


The Cage of Hope

by Jacobeth, PlatonicRabbit



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Demon possession, Implied Sexual Content, Lucifer's Cage, M/M, Minor Character Death, complete re-ordering and downright overruling of canon lore and storyline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 17:21:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 29,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8410123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jacobeth/pseuds/Jacobeth, https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlatonicRabbit/pseuds/PlatonicRabbit
Summary: Sam Winchester got out of hunting and went to live with his grandfather Henry as a teenager.When Henry dies, Sam, now a lawyer, returns to Kansas for his funeral.To his surprise, Henry’s will entrusts Sam with the guardianship of a magical box passed down in the Winchester family for generations; a box that talks to Sam and reveals it has a living being caged inside it.When the Men of Letters and a group of demons begin hunting Sam in order to take the box, he and his brother go on the run to avoid them, while Sam gets to know the being for whom he has inadvertently become jailkeeper, and begins to feel conflicted.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Author: PlatonicRabbit/ Platonic-Rabbit on tumblr  
> Artist: Jacobeth/ Theartbluebox on tumblr
> 
> Betas: Mrs_Simon_Tam_PHD/ Lucibae-is-dancing-in-hell on tumblr & Whitmerule
> 
> Notes: The AU this is set in may not be clear, at first, but I did my best to make sure all the changes were explained. If anything I've changed is unclear, please, feel free to ask me for an explanation.

The war was finally over. At the end of this last battle, the demons would be defeated, Amara and her twisted, shadowy creations, her dark mirrors of the true Creation, would be pushed back once and for all.  
Earth and its inhabitants would be Heaven’s domain to rule.

The archangel was the first to arrive at the field of battle, but this was not unusual. 

_Inspired_ , they called it. _Loyal_ , their Father once had.

 _Bloodthirsty_ , the other angels had whispered behind their back. _Battle-hungry_.

The angel didn’t care. As long as they had their Father's favour, it mattered little to them what the lesser ranks muttered in their jealousy.

A day and a night, the angel passed alone on the battlefield before they knew something was wrong.  
The others weren’t coming.

The other angels, anyway.

Storm clouds and fog heralded the arrival of the army of Darkness, and thunder served as their battle-cries.

The five living Archdemons and an entire host of their lesser kin slithered and crawled and swooped onto the battlefield, surrounding the lone Archangel. Outnumbered and outmatched, and betrayed, the demons half expected the angel to surrender.

But the Morningstar was feared among the angels and demons alike for a reason.  
Swords and claws and teeth and wings clashed across the field and bright ichor rained through the air. The waves of lower-ranked, weaker stock cowered and fell before him, even with the angel releasing only the barest edges of their power.  
The leaders, the true enemies, hung back, watching, waiting. All except the youngest, the weakest of the Demon Lords.

He joined the battle, whip in hand, high pitched, nasally laugh echoing across the field even through the storm the was swirling around the battle, and the angel smote him with a flash of light that vaporised the rest of the near-routed horde as they fled.

Sword held loosely in one hand, the angel stepped over the charred, smoking body of the fallen Archdemon, towards the remaining foes.  
No words had passed between them thus far, and none would. It wasn't necessary.

One, the Fifth of the seven, barely stronger than the Seventh demon lying dead at the angel’s feet, turned and fled.  
If the angels didn’t catch him, his own kind would. The lone archangel let him flee. The weaker demon was nothing, anyway, compared to the three still standing before him. The Fourth, Third and First Archdemons were the only ones left remotely able to stand up to them.

A light appeared, from the sky behind the Archangel, and they grinned, their enjoyment of the battle clearly showing on the borrowed human face, through the glowing eyes, the exhilaration and joy written in every line of their body. The wind buffeted their short, pale hair and the noise and light of their brother’s arrival flayed skin from the imperfect vessel.

Lucifer turned slightly to greet Michael, welcome them to the battle, late as they may be, eagerly anticipating their finishing the war, together, spilling the blood of the last of Amara’s children between them.The last thing the Morningstar registered was the triumph, the sorrow and the determination on their brother’s face before the looming, empty abyss in Michael’s hands pulled all the remaining combatants inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, reader! Thank you so much for giving me a chance. If anyone is confused about the timeline or background lore in this verse, I am more than happy to provide a full explanation! Message me at platonic-rabbit.tumblr.com, where I can be found blogging about cute animals 90% of the time. (Also, follow me if you like cute animals! :D)


	2. Chapter One

Sam was in the kitchen washing dishes when his phone rang. He hurried back to his living room, where he had to practically fold himself in half on the cheap lounge to make his phone reach his ear without dislodging the charger.

‘Hello?’ Sam noted the unfamiliar caller I.D. That wouldn't be unusual on his work phone, but this was his personal number.

The voice that answered him was one that Sam hadn’t heard in years. Gruff, worn and rusty with too much hard liquor and not enough sleep. John sounded worse than he had three years ago when Sam had last heard from him.

‘Sammy.’

Sam’s breath caught in his throat. From a distance he felt his whole body go hot and the blood roar in his ears.

‘Dad,’ he somehow choked out. By some miracle, Sam’s voice was steady, unaffected. Inside, though, his heart was racing, his mind thrown into instant turmoil. John wouldn't have called unless something was really wrong. Unless someone was dead or dying. The question, _is Dean okay, are you okay,_ stuck in Sam's throat.

‘I’m just calling to tell you. Henry’s dead. Another stroke. The funeral is in five days. In Kansas. And you’re needed for the will reading.’

John hung up as abruptly as he’d called, and that was it. The first contact in nearly four years, since Henry had badgered John into calling Sam when he’d graduated, and then badgered Sam into taking the call, and it had been kept as cold, as perfunctory and clipped as possible, even now. Sam wondered absently if it was John’s fault or his that they couldn’t connect, and then chided himself for the thought. Henry wouldn’t have wanted that for his son and grandson, for either of them to be thinking about their soured relationship, now. Henry would have... 

Sam was suddenly glad he was already sitting down.

 

He walked back into the kitchen in a daze and reached for his half-finished coffee on the bench. As he stared blankly into the tepid liquid, the news suddenly sank in.  
Sam’s mug went clattering into the sink and he sank down to the floor against his kitchen cabinet.  
Henry was dead.

His grandad, the man who’d taken Sam in and given him a life other than cheap motels and petty theft and hunt after hunt after hunt, was gone. 

He hadn't even gotten to say goodbye.

Sam had known this was coming, of course. His grandfather hadn’t ever recovered from the minor stroke he’d had almost ten years ago. Less than a year after Sam had gone to live with him.  
That first stroke had been Sam’s excuse for staying with Henry, for not swallowing his pride and going back to John and Dean. When he’d gotten into Stanford, his grandfather had come with him, moved into a house just off campus for the duration of Sam’s law degree, before going back to Kansas while Sam had stayed on in California.

Neither of them had acknowledged it, but they’d both known Henry was returning home to die. Sam knew he should have been better prepared for this. But he wasn’t.

Picking himself up off the floor, he grabbed the good bottle of liquor out of the back cupboard, the one he kept on hand in case his grandfather ever dropped by. No chance of that now.

 

Sam was about half a bottle deep when his phone rang again.

‘Heya, Sammy, Dad just called, I’m driving back there now… look, man, I’m sorry, I know you liked the stuffy old guy’- 

Sam hung up on him right there. Conversations with Dean never tended go well when one of them was drunk, and he didn’t need Dean’s fake sympathy for the grandfather his older brother had never taken the opportunity to know. The last thing Sam did before stumbling into bed was book a plane ticket to Kansas.

 

Sam snapped awake the next morning, his third alarm blaring into his over-sensitive ears, morning sunlight like knives in his eyes.

It was a work day, Sam remembered. Luckily not one with any early meetings, because he’d slept in til 7.30 and his head was pounding. He was a little puzzled for a moment as to why he was so hungover, but at last the calls from John and Dean the previous night came back to him. Sam sat up and rested his face in his hands allowing the renewed grief to wash over him.

There should be a procedure for occasions like this. Someone to step in and sort everything out. Tell him what to do.  
Normally, Sam would be that person. The responsible Winchester, the one to look after Henry when he couldn’t do it himself. But from what John had said, everything seemed to be taken care of already. For a moment Sam felt selfishly hurt that John, the rebel, the renegade son who’d walked away from his legacy, from his family, had been called before Sam, who’d cared for Henry, who'd been there for the first stroke, and loved the elderly man better than his own son ever had.  
But that wasn’t fair. John was, and always would be, Henry’s son. Sam remembered that. He did.

He stumbled out to his kitchen, ignoring the mess from the previous night- spills, unwashed dishes, glasses smashed on the floor where Sam had knocked them off the table, the explosive residue of a beer bottle thrown at the wall in a fit of anger, the fridge door hanging open- Sam winced at that and hurriedly closed it. 

There was a computer printout resting on the kitchen table. An e-ticket for a flight to Kansas. The sight of it triggered a vague memory of booking the ticket while extremely drunk, which worried Sam; he checked the time on the flight and groaned.

Swearing at his drunk self, Sam hauled his hungover, protesting body into the shower, ignoring the hot tap completely. There wasn’t really time for a shower, because his idiot alcohol-impaired self had booked a 10AM flight, but Sam would be damned if he subjected innocent passengers to whatever he must smell like after last night.

It was one of the fastest showers of Sam’s life. When he got out, he returned to his room to throw a few pairs of jeans and a suit into his duffel bag. Luckily it seemed the years of learning how to pack quick and light when John moved them around hadn’t faded from Sam’s memories.  
He shoved the ready-to-go travel bag of toiletries, his current case notes, a few clothes and his phone charger into his bag and threw it over his shoulder. Anything else, he could buy in Kansas.

 

Sam called his boss from the car. To his surprise, Ms. Talbot was more than understanding of his suddenly taking two weeks off on a moment’s notice. Not questioning his good luck, Sam’s next call was to Jess, asking her to pick up his car from the airport. She had a spare set of keys. It used to be their car before they had broken up, after all.  
The call went to voicemail, as usual, and Sam could only hope Jess was feeling generous enough to listen to it this week. She hadn’t understood, when he’d broken up with her, why he was doing it, and so the friendship he’d fooled himself into believing they could have had after their break up withered and died. Sam regretted leaving Jess, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to tell her the truth, and lying to her about who he was, his family, had been killing him. It had been killing them.

The secrets Henry had kept from Millie and John were the things that had come between the elder Winchester men. They were the reason John had left, when he was told the truth, as a teenager, why he’d never been able to forgive Henry for lying to him for all those years, for never having told his own wife the truth, about the supernatural, the Men of Letters, everything. John had left, disgusted, and found the Campbells, and immediately fallen in with them. It was Deanna Campbell who had taught John to hunt, and Mary who had given him a new life, a new purpose other than following in Henry’s footsteps. With Mary, he hadn’t had to hide, and when their children were born, the couple had told them the truth about the world they lived in from the beginning.  
Until Mary died, and John shut his boys out.

Sam wouldn’t repeat Henry’s mistakes, losing his son and putting a barrier up between himself and his wife, by keeping lies between them forever. And because of that, no matter how much he’d loved Jess, he couldn’t be with her.  
And he couldn’t tell her why.

Now, more than ever before, Sam wished she could have been there with him. He wished he had someone to lean on through the next week, while he buried his grandfather.  
But Jess wasn’t the one.

 

Sam arrived at the airport at two minutes past nine, panicking, but the staff were feeling kind that day and allowed him through check-in despite the missed deadline. He dropped into a seat in the departure lounge and rested his head in his hands for the wait.


	3. Chapter Two

Sam was surprised when exiting the plane to see a solitary, familiar figure in the arrivals lounge. ‘Dude, how did you even know to be here? Lebanon is four hours away,’ he greeted his brother.

‘You texted me your flight details last night, moron,’ Dean snorted at him. The elder Winchester sniffed the air and made a face. ‘You smell like you got really drunk and didn’t brush your teeth.’

Sam sniffed his own breath to confirm and made a face. ‘I was in a hurry.’

Dean continued to grumble about Sam’s whiskey breath as they left the airport. The pleasantries were strained, not quite fake but not genuine either.

Sam stopped short upon seeing the Impala. ‘I’m not sitting in a car with Dad for four hours,’ he warned.

Dean almost growled at him. ‘It's been thirteen years since you’ve spent time with him, Sammy, you haven't even picked up the damn phone in more than three years, just give the guy a break.’

Sam’s jaw set in a stubborn way that was familiar to both Winchesters and Dean rolled his eyes at him. 

‘Dad isn’t here.’ Dean’s voice was short and clipped with old frustration. He climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door as hard as he could.

After taking a deep breath and slowly releasing it, forcing some of the tension out of his body, Sam crossed to the passenger side and got in. ‘So why do you have the Impala?’ he questioned as he fumbled with the seatbelt.

‘Dad gave it to me after we mostly stopped hunting together. Thought I'd told you already.’ 

Sam frowned. ‘You go hunting alone? Regularly? Dad too?’

‘I'm thirty one,’ Dean said, sounding affronted. 

‘No, that's not- It's not about your age, Dean, hunting alone is dangerous, and stupid, no matter how good you are. And what about dad? He's in his fifties, Dean, he's not as fast as he used to be. How can you let him go off without backup?’

The angry flush on his brother's face told Sam he'd hit a sore point. So maybe Dean wasn't happy about the arrangement either, but he didn't seem ready to admit that to Sam. 

‘What would you know about hunting, Sam? You left. You haven't even seen dad in years.’

‘If I could count the number of times you and dad came crying to me or Henry because you’d dug yourselves in too deep and didn’t know what you were up against-’

‘Yeah, you’re great if we need to phone a friend. But that doesn’t make you better than us. You probably couldn’t even handle a salt n’ burn after all the prissy book learning you did in that dusty old cellar with Grandpa. And unless you want to arrange your own transport the rest of the way, maybe you should just shut up and act grateful for once. I’ve already driven for four hours today to pick your sorry ass up.’

Sam was careful to turn his face to the window to hide his expression and didn't speak up again. Now wasn't a good time for this discussion at all. 

Dean, too, gave up on the conversation, and turned to the radio to fill the silence. He hit a few buttons and music blared through the old car, Led Zeppelin as usual.

At least some things hadn’t changed.

 

Dean was squatting in Henry’s house, apparently. Sam bit back his irritated remark about that, knowing that to Dean, a free roof over his head was a free roof over his head, even if just moving into their grandfather’s house now that he was gone seemed disrespectful to Sam. He wordlessly climbed out of the car, following Dean into the house.

His brother had spread his things out around the living room. He hadn’t moved in, exactly, but he’d clearly been here a while. Sam had been wrong. Dean wasn’t squatting. He’d been staying here since before well Henry had died.

‘How long was he sick?’ there was another stab of habitual anger in Sam’s words, childish frustration at being left out of the loop, and jealousy that Dean and John were allowed to be there first, when Sam was the one who had really cared for Henry.

Dean had the good grace to look guilty. ‘He started getting worse a few months ago, and I started hanging around the area around then. But the doctors told him he still had almost a year. No one saw the stroke coming. He didn't mean to never tell you, Sam, he just didn't want you quitting your job and running back here to look after him. So he waited.’

Sam stayed quiet. Part of him knew Dean was right. Sam may have done just that if he’d known Henry was at death’s door. It didn’t stop him from feeling left out, or from feeling that he would have been right to drop everything in his own life. Henry had been there for Sam when he’d needed help, and Sam had been denied the chance to help Henry in return.

Dean rubbed his face. ‘I’ll leave you alone to deal with your stuff.’ He left the room quickly, heading for the kitchen, presumably in search of beer. 

Sam didn’t blame him. He felt about ready to hit Dean. He wanted to hit something. Hell, he needed to hit something.  
Luckily Henry had found an outlet for Sam’s mood swings a long time ago. Sam kicked his shoes off and dropped his stuff in the room that had been his as a teenager before heading downstairs to the basement where Henry kept Sam’s punching bag.

He didn’t come back up until almost midnight. Dean had passed out on the couch, empty beer still in his hand and TV mutely displaying a porn channel. Probably just to make Sam uncomfortable when he came in. Sam rolled his eyes and shut the screen off. He shoved a pillow under Dean’s head, took the bottle out of his hand and left him there for the night.

 

Dean woke first, accustomed as he was to a hunter’s sleep schedule, and immediately crept into Sam’s room to wake him up by shouting in his ear. Sam came to, bewildered and wide-eyed, and struck out blindly at his brother before shooing him out of the room.

The atmosphere between the brothers was still frosty that morning, but there was coffee waiting for Sam as a peace offering.

When they were finished, Dean cleared his throat. ‘So, I was thinking we could start packing up the house today. Dad offered to help. I told him I’d get back to him later if you said you were okay with it.’

Sam busied himself with clearing the dishes to buy a moment. He sighed. Time to bury the hatchet, he supposed. ‘He can come. Though, shouldn’t we wait for the will reading before we pack? Otherwise we’ll just have to get it all back out later.’

‘Oh… yeah. I didn’t think of that.’ Dean looked deflated. Sam wondered if John’s invitation had been a pretext for a possible reconciliation between father and son.

‘Well, we can pack up some of the more obvious things,’ Sam shrugged, giving Dean an out. ‘My room, for example. And we can tidy up. And we can look into real estate dealers in preparation for selling. Is the funeral all taken care of?’ Sam was surprising himself with how together he was. Henry had always said he coped well in a crisis, he could compartmentalise and wall himself off to a degree that was a little scary, but even so, he’d been expecting he’d go to pieces at some point.  
There was, of course, another thing Sam had been hoping to get done today, but John would pitch a fit if he knew what Sam was planning, so maybe it would be better to leave it until after his father's visit. 

‘Yeah, the funeral directors are handling it all. I gave them a list of everyone and the name of one of Henry’s… work colleagues who can call the people I don’t know. There’s been a notice in the paper. I don’t really know anyone else specific to call.’

Sam nodded. ‘If the Men of Letters have been notified, they probably have their own procedure to follow.’

The brothers fell silent for a minute. Dean was the first to grow uneasy. ‘So, packing up your room, huh? You wanna move the Playboys out from under the mattress or whatever, before I go in there?’

Sam rolled his eyes. ‘I did all that when I moved out, Dean.’ Sam took the suggestion, though, and left the kitchen without another word, returning to his old bedroom to begin packing. 

 

They spent the rest of the morning boxing up the remnants of Sam’s teenage years, both in his room and downstairs in the basement. By the time John arrived, it was already finished.

John cleaned out the various cupboards, taking cleaning products and unneeded food out and cleaning the spaces. He worked separately from his sons, who spent the afternoon tidying the garden for something to do, Dean giving the lawn the patchiest, most poorly done mowing job Sam had ever seen. Sam didn’t have the heart to point out the areas Dean had missed, knowing his brother had probably never mowed a lawn before in his life. He just rolled his eyes and went back to the weeding.

By that evening, they were all exhausted enough that there was no longer any possibility of Sam and John picking a fight with each other. Instead, the three Winchester men collapsed on Henry’s couch with beers and spent the night in companionable, if uneasy, silence.

 

As Sam was heading to bed to sleep, his phone rang.

‘Samuel Winchester?’ 

Sam didn’t recognise the voice on the other end, but was fairly certain of who the speaker was, or at least, who they represented. ‘Speaking.’

‘Good evening, Mr. Winchester. I am a representative of the organisation your grandfather Henry Winchester was employed by. He has left instructions for us to contact you, and not his son, as would be the normal procedure in such a case. Were you expecting this call?’

Sam touched the ring his grandfather had had commissioned for Sam when he'd graduated. It had been meant as both a reminder that another path was always open to the grandson of Henry Winchester and insurance against the possibility of Henry and Sam not meeting again. ‘I have been. I know where the Kansas chapter headquarters are, if you’d like me to come in for a meeting.’

‘We would. Tomorrow morning, eight o’clock sharp, if you please, Mr. Winchester.’

Sam interrupted him. ‘Actually I'm afraid tomorrow won't be suitable. I would prefer to leave such matters be for a few days, until after the funeral. As I'm sure you understand, sir, my family is quite busy with getting my grandfather's affairs in order. The Men of Letters can wait.’ If they'd had the decency to call at a reasonable hour, Sam might have gone along with what the organisation wanted. But calling him at half past one two days after his grandfather's death struck Sam as... well, dickish.

There was a silence down the line, one Sam had heard before many times in his work as a lawyer. It was the silence of a man accustomed to getting his way having to adjust to suddenly not. Sam’s breach of protocol by using the organisation’s name over the phone couldn’t have helped the nameless representative to remain composed either.

‘I'm afraid I cannot be moved on this, Sir,’ Sam spoke again when he felt the pause was continuing for too long. 

‘Very well, Mr. Winchester. As you like. Of course, we in the organisation were very fond of Henry, and we do understand your need to grieve for him.’

‘Thank you. We can arrange a meeting for Thursday, after the will reading,’ Sam said. ‘Now, it is quite late, and I have a busy week ahead of me, so if you don't mind’-

‘Very well, Mr. Winchester. 4pm on Thursday. You know where to present yourself.’

Sam agreed, and was about to hang up when the nameless Man of Letters spoke again.

‘There is one other matter. A box, of the type we interest ourselves in, that your grandfather wrongfully kept from us. We would like you to bring it with you.’

Sam rubbed the back of his neck. ‘A box?’

‘It is black in colour, forged from an unidentified metal. It bears markings in a dead language known as Enochian. You should be familiar with it, Mr. Winchester, from your training. It will be somewhere secure. Your grandfather’s safe, perhaps. You’ll know the combination, of course.’

Sam was about to ask why this was relevant when the Man of Letters on the other end of the line hung up on him.

Sam muttered a curse. This attitude, which was unfortunately the prevailing one in the Men of Letters upper echelons, was the reason he’d delayed becoming an active member for as long as possible, but, with Henry dead, the organisation would insist on a Winchester legacy taking his place, and it damn sure wouldn’t be John or Dean. Sam’s time of reprieve from the supernatural world was coming to a close.  
Because of those bloody pompous asses.

Dean and John had already passed out on the couches, so Sam took the opportunity to quietly tread back down the hall to Henry’s study. In the small, familiar room, he looked around. Henry didn’t even have a safe, to Sam's knowledge. And he'd never seen anything like the object that had been described to him. 

Sam sat in the leather office chair and tried to imagine his grandfather, sitting in this place, almost every day for years. Sam remembered countless occasions throughout his own teenage years when he’d watched Henry work or lecture him from this very chair. One by one, he opened the desk drawers, to no success. He checked under the furniture for scuff marks that might indicate pieces had been frequently shifted, and behind picture frames for hidden papers.  
There was nothing. After almost half an hour Sam was ready to give up. It was late, he was half drunk, and the box wasn't going to be needed for almost a week. 

A creak outside the office alerted Sam to one of the other occupants of the house moving around. A groggy voice spoke up from the doorway. ‘What the hell are you doing, Sammy?’ Dean blinked rapidly as his eyes adjusted to the electric lights.

‘The Men of Letters want me to find a box Henry was apparently holding onto, although I don’t understand why they couldn't have gotten it from him. If he was keeping it from them I’d like to know why, and what it is. But I can't find anything remotely like the object that was described to me. I think Henry would have hidden it, but I have no clue where to look.’ Sam dropped his head into his hands and rubbed his temples.

‘Oh. Well, you’re doing it wrong. You lived in this house for years. Anything Henry wanted to keep hidden isn’t going to be somewhere you would look. Cause, you know, you might have found it as a kid.’

‘What, and you can find it?’ Sam glared at Dean. 

Dean shrugged and crossed the room to the air vent. ‘I've turned the AC on a few times while I've been staying here. This vent rattles, dude. It’s weird.’

‘Yeah? That vent’s always rattled. It only vents cold air, too, no matter what it's set to, so I think it's a mechanical problem.’

Dean actually laughed at him. ‘See, that’s why you'll never find it. You’re too used to this house. You don’t even notice the vent making a weird noise.’ He popped the cover off and reached inside, rummaged around. After mere seconds, he pulled something out and held it up triumphantly.

It was a velvet bag, with something large and heavy inside it. Dean handed the bag to Sam, who opened the drawstring hesitantly.

The box was… Sam couldn’t describe it beyond a sudden overwhelming need to touch. But Henry had taught him better than that. It was cursed and probably in the bag for a reason. Nevertheless, Sam caught himself with his fingers reaching into the bag as if to pull it out.

‘So what the hell is it?’ Dean asked, leaning around Sam to try to get a look. ‘Cursed object? Dad has a secure storage locker for stuff like that, if you want to dump it someplace.’

Sam stared at the box, at the unusual way the light caught it, reflecting from the unfamiliar sigil dominating one face, and what he thought was Enochian lettering scorched into the sides. It almost seemed the box was absorbing the light into itself. With difficulty, Sam closed the drawstring and looked away. ‘No, I don’t think so. If it was something as simple as that, Henry would have taken it to the Men of Letters, not stashed it in a vent.’

Dean nodded, considering. ‘Well… what else could it be?’

‘I don’t know. Tomorrow I’ll translate the lettering and have a look through some of Henry’s lore books. Maybe we can identify it,’ Sam yawned. ‘It’s late. We should get back to sleep. Thanks for finding it.’ Holding the velvet bag away from himself, Sam returned to his room, not waiting for Dean.

‘Any time, little brother,’ Dean muttered after he was gone.


	4. Chapter Three

Sam slept fitfully that night. He woke three times, certain he'd heard someone calling out, and in the morning he was tired and snappish.

With all three of them hungover and grieving, and the tension already lying between Sam and John, the fight that broke out almost as soon as breakfast was over was almost inevitable. This time, though, it was John, and not Sam who walked out.

Dean followed their father out the door with a disappointed glare at Sam, just to make sure John didn’t go straight to a bar and pick a fight, and Sam was left alone for the day. He retrieved the box from his room and Henry’s Enochian books from the study and got to work deciphering the inscriptions, still careful to avoid touching the box directly.

Enochian translations were always slow going. There were no truly reliable texts in existence to assist supernaturalists with the ancient language, and quite a few contradictory ones. It had been theorised that some of these relics had been planted deliberately in some sort of attempt to obscure the tongue, but no one had ever been able to come up with a who or why behind it. 

Henry’s books on the language, however, most of them given to him by his mentor, a former Man of Letters who'd broken with the organisation, were the best available, better even than the standard approved texts the organisation could boast. 

The large sigil, dominating an entire face on its own, was untranslatable. Nothing in any of Henry's books even approached it. Sam decided to leave it. If it was a Name Sigil or just artwork, he was wasting his time, and if not, the more detailed script on the opposite face might provide more clues. 

By the end of the day Sam had the smaller text as well translated as it could ever be. 

The lettering on the box told a familiar story, or the beginning of one. A box had been created, a prison built to contain both great darkness and great light, that must never be opened lest the sorrows it contained wreak havoc on the world.  
The tale of Pandora’s Box was a legend that Sam was familiar with, that Henry had read to him once, the only time John had ever allowed Henry to look after the boys before Mary had died. Sam thought, in fact, that it might be the only bedtime story he’d ever been told, and wondered if this was why.  
“Abandon all hope, ye who open this box.” Sam frowned. That line, the last part of the text, seemed out of place, a reference to a completely different mythology, from a much later era in history than the rest of the wording. It must be a coincidence, especially if this was really Pandora’s Box, that a paraphrased line from Dante was carved into it. Then again, given the text was inscribed in Enochian lettering, perhaps even the similarities to the Greek myth were mere coincidence..  
Sam wished he could identify anything else about the box; what metal it was made out of, how old it was, its history. Any information could be helpful.

The metal was too perfect, too well kept and unscratched to possibly be as old as the inscriptions implied, and beyond that, too well crafted to be made by pre-industrial human hands. Based on that, Sam would have guessed that the box itself was recently made, to imitate a much older artifact, and the curse or object it contained was the only interesting thing about it. And yet some instinct told Sam this was wrong. 

He sighed. The translation was done, and yet Sam was no closer to an answer. Henry had nothing else in the house, in either his office or library, that related to the box or its origins. Sam had checked.

There was only one place left to look. Fortunately, the people he'd need to talk to had already been in contact.

Sam heard the familiar rumble of the Impala’s engine signalling Dean’s return and closed his books. 

 

The days until the funeral passed while Sam idled the time away with Henry’s lore books and Dean’s cheap beer. The nights passed uneasily, Sam’s sleep fitful and disturbed. During the day he began to feel like someone was watching him from over his shoulder, and he caught himself startling easily. Dean began to comment on Sam’s jumpiness, and he made an effort to calm himself down. With no further progress in his research, Sam stowed the box away carefully under the floorboard in his room that he had, as a teenager, pried loose, simply because Harry Potter had had a loose floorboard for hiding things in and Sam had thought it was a cool idea. Henry probably would have lectured him for hours for destroying the floor, if he’d ever known, but then again, Henry had always been weirdly fond of Harry Potter. “Never trust anything if you can’t see where it keeps its brain”, a line originally from Arthur Weasley, had been carved into the wood of the shelf Henry kept his books on cursed objects on.

Thinking about that board for some reason triggered an avalanche of childhood memories in Sam’s mind which held back the emotions until Dean was pulling into the parking lot. Suddenly it all became real, Henry’s death, his funeral, when they turned the corner and the coffin came into view. The next few hours, the eulogies, the flowers, the wave after wave of well-wishers coming to console the remaining Winchesters, all were lost in a haze in Sam’s mind. Afterwards, he wasn’t sure he could have recounted a single second of it. He knew he’d given a eulogy, he remembered writing it, printing out the notes. He couldn’t remember speaking, or whether it had been received well. 

Absurdly, the one clear image Sam retained was of the stained glass window over the door of the tiny chapel. He'd caught a glimpse of it overhead as he'd carried the coffin out with Dean, John and some of Henry's other friends. The picture was just an ordinary robed, winged, haloed church angel, blond and carrying a trumpet, but the memory swam through Sam’s head ceaselessly on the way home.

 

When the Impala rolled into Henry’s driveway, however, even that memory was shoved aside when Sam saw the front door hanging open. Dean was pulling his gun from his coat almost before he’d parked. Both brothers rushed inside, but the house stood silent and empty, and no intruders were found inside. Sam took the opportunity to check the box under his floorboard while Dean was checking the basement.

‘Was anything taken?’ Dean asked as he tucked his gun away, when they were finally certain no intruders were still on the property.

‘How should I know?’ Sam snapped, nerves frayed by his recently disturbed sleep. ‘Nothing obvious. I don’t even know what would be worth taking from Henry’s house.’ he looked around, forcing himself to calm down and think about this rationally. ‘The TV’s still here. So’s the silverware. I doubt it was a run-of-the-mill burglary. Maybe someone was searching for something?’

He went into the office and started looking through papers. ‘Maybe Magnus? He was Henry’s mentor, and knowing him, he may have decided that gives him first pick at any magical artifacts Henry owned. And he wasn't at the funeral, not that I'd expected him to be.’

Dean shrugged. ‘It could be the Men of Letters,’ he suggested.

‘Them too,’ Sam said, suddenly glad he’d already checked on the box. Sudden intuition told him that it had been the object of the search, though he kept his suspicions to himself.

Nothing else came of the break-in, though, and eventually Dean suggested, though neither brother believed it, that one of them had left the door open on their way out, simply to put an end to the matter. It was Sam who suggested calling John and asking him to check the place for anything the two of them could have missed, and Dean who shot the idea down. 

‘He's… a little paranoid these days. He's been doing more dangerous hunts since I went solo, getting reckless, and it's making him jumpy. He'd insist we move into a motel room under fake names and salt all the entrances. Even if he didn't find jack,’ Dean admitted.

Sam frowned. If even Dean could admit that much, there was a serious problem. But Sam’s relationship with his father was too much of a tangled mess for his intervention to be able to do any good, and Sam had to trust that Dean could keep an eye on John. 

 

That night, Sam dreamed again, strange dreams he woke up from shivering, his breath fogging the suddenly chilly air.  
Sam told himself if it happened again he’d have Dean search the house for ghosts, although a manifestation this quickly after death would be unprecedented.  
There weren’t many recorded cases of what happened when a man as well-trained in magical arts as Henry became a ghost. Maybe he would be able to manifest faster because of his skills. But Henry hadn’t died violently, or had unfinished business that anyone in his family knew about. He wouldn’t linger, Sam was sure.

No, it couldn't be a ghost. But there was another suspicious magical object in his room, one that radiated a chilly aura. 

Sam kept his speculations to himself on the way to the will reading. They could discuss it on the way back or before Sam left to meet the Men of Letters.

 

John was left nothing but a bit of cash, surprising no one except him. ‘I was his son,’ John grumbled.

‘Dad, what would you have even done with a house, or any personal objects? You’d just have sold them anyway,’ Sam told him.

As usual, Sam’s attempts to bring common sense into the equation only served to irritate John and almost started an argument, until Dean cut them both off by kicking their shins.

Dean was left the house and the furniture, with a note from Henry saying that he knew his eldest grandson would appreciate having a home to come back to when he needed a rest from his wanderings. Dean was stunned when the deed was placed in his hands, speechless for once.

Sam was left the box and Henry’s key to the Men of Letters facilities, though the executor simply referred to both as personal items, the entirety of Henry's library, and money. There was also a long letter that Henry had left for Sam, and this was handed over as well. He walked out of the room, leaving Dean to process the news of his new home ownership, and quietly opened the letter, his grandfather's last words to him. 

_Dear Sam-_

By the time you have received this, I will have passed on. I know that you're probably tearing yourself apart, saying you should have been here for me, you should have come home to Kansas, but you didn’t know. I didn’t want you to have to watch my dying. The last time I saw you was at your graduation, when I was still healthy. I want you to remember me that way, Sam. You're young, intelligent, and making a name for yourself in this world. Living your own life, not mine, and not your father’s. That's more important than attending some old man’s deathbed.  
I’m proud of you Sam, I’m proud of everything you’ve achieved. I’m proud that the boy I knew as my dear little grandson grew into one of the kindest, most driven, most accomplished young men I’ve ever met, and I’m honoured to have had a part in your life.

Onto less personal matters, Sam; one of the "personal" items you have been left is a box, small, metallic, marked in Enochian. It is hidden in the house, although you have never seen it before. I took care to ensure that. While you were living with me I kept it in the bunker, and it was when I removed it from its hiding place after you left that the Men of Letters discovered me with it. They have been relentless in their attempts to acquire it ever since. I will not say where in the house it is hidden, for fear of this letter being interfered with before you should see it. I trust you will have some ideas that others not as acquainted with me or the house will not.  
The box is in a velvet bag. This covering is not magical or indeed special at all, but it does put a layer between you and the box, should you have to pick it up. I urge you not to take the box out of its wrapping, Sam. Do not, under any circumstances, touch it directly.

Then Men of Letters would have contacted you about the box, as they have been imploring and threatening me to hand it over for many years now, but I beg you, do not give it to them. They wish to tamper with it, harness it, to use it for themselves. I don't want to think of what could happen. Some things, Sam, should not be left in the hands of such men as that society breeds. I cannot say much more in such an unsecure communication. But the box is yours, Sam, to guard with your life, not theirs to abuse.

This next part is important, Sam, so pay attention. Do not open the box, Samuel. I implore you, do not open the box. Do not listen to the box if it decides that it wants to try to speak to you. This is important, of utmost importance. Do not open the box, do not listen to the box, do not give the box to the Men of Letters. 

Thank you for living with me, taking care of me, and being more of a son to me than John ever was. You made me a very happy old man, Sam, and I'm honoured to call you my grandson. I hope we can see each other again in another life.  
Your Grandfather-  
Henry M. Winchester

 

On the way home to wait out the hours until the meeting, Sam mentioned the chill in his room.  
Dean, unfortunately, had seen the aftermath of one too many soccer mums ignoring supernatural omens, and the car swerved dangerously as Dean’s attention was diverted to yelling at Sam for not speaking up. When they rolled back into Henry’s, now Dean’s, driveway, the brothers had settled into angry, accusatory silence.

Dean walked around the house with his EMF reader three times and swore it only went off around items they already knew to be magical. To confirm, they moved all those items outside and tried again, and found no significant readings at all.

‘I don’t know, Sammy, maybe your room just got a cold wind last night,’ Dean looked troubled. 

‘Maybe,’ Sam frowned. ‘Check the box?’

When Dean put the reader near the box it screamed at them, static blaring out so loud it almost hurt and lights blaring red and unblinking.

 

The Men of Letters chapter base in Kansas, an underground bunker Sam had adored visiting as a teenager, was packed with actual Men of Letters for the first time Sam could remember. Normally the base was assigned only two or three active members at once. Henry's partner, Maura Leahy, had chosen to live on-site, her daughter away at boarding school, so she had usually been there with kind words and baked goods when Henry brought Sam in for lessons. Henry, however, had needed a real address to raise his son and grandson in, so had operated mainly from outside the base. 

Sam knew the bunker was used occasionally as a meeting hall, but he'd never seen it. Finding the usually quiet library full of people came as a shock. 

‘Ah, young Mr. Winchester,’ a portly gentleman exclaimed upon catching sight of Sam. His voice was recognizable as that of the man Sam had spoken to on the phone. 

Sam nodded to the man and soon enough, everyone was seated around a long table. Sam was at the foot with no one else for two places either side of him.  
It felt a little like a make-do set up for an interrogation.

‘Mr. Winchester,’ the man at the head of the table began once they were seated. ‘I'm sure your grandfather informed you of our rites of succession?’

Sam nodded, then cleared his throat. ‘He did, sir.’

The man nodded. ‘Good. Very good. So you understand how things would usually proceed from here?’

‘Yes, sir. I am aware of the oath and the rites, and I'm already more than familiar with the Kansas and California chapters from my time as an initiate. I will require some time to arrange to move away from California. I'm sure you're aware I have a life there to pack up. But Henry, my grandfather, that is, was always clear that I would be expected to become an active member and serve the Men of Letters, in addition to my own life, when the time came, and I am willing to assume the responsibility.’ 

Sam wasn’t, in fact, as willing as he forced himself to appear. But the Men of Letters could easily get Sam fired, ruin his life in California, if he refused. This way, he could take his time, get himself out, and go back to his real life. And in the meantime, he and Dean could live in the house his brother had inherited. Dean might stay, if Sam did. Get out of hunting, settle down. 

A silence overtook the room after Sam finished his piece, and it made him uneasy. The head Man of Letters cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘Yes, Mr. Winchester. I am relieved to see that this time, at least, the induction ceremony of a Winchester should proceed smoothly. We were ever so disappointed when your father rejected us so… uncouthly, and as for your grandfather's initiation, the less said about that morbid affair the better.’

Sam noticed three of the elder men in the room shudder and actually cross themselves and he felt a moment of bewilderment over what could have happened over fifty years ago when his grandfather had become a Man of Letters that haunted the secretive organisation to this day. He knew it had something to do with the woman named Josie whose picture Henry kept in his desk drawer, but the elder Winchester had always kept quiet about what had happened.

‘However… there is one small matter we have decided we simply must insist upon.’

Sam smiled awkwardly. ‘I assume this has to do with this box you requested I bring?’ he reached down to put his briefcase up on the table and popped the latches on it, almost imagining he could feel an aura settle into the room as soon as the velvet bag was exposed, a chill in the air that was noticeable in the heated bunker.

The metal box inside thudded dully on the table as Sam placed the bag down. The Men of Letters sitting around seemed to stiffen and draw closer. 

‘Could you take it out of the bag, please, Mr. Winchester?’

As Sam tipped the bag over, his fingers brushed the cold metal and-

_-cold, so cold, and so small, like being trapped in a cat carrier, and it was impossible to feel hope, love, joy, impossible to feel anything but bitter, inescapable loneliness, so lonely, abandoned, forgotten-_

-the sensation was indescribable. Sam withdrew his fingers as quickly as he could, hoping his shock wasn't visible on his face. The assembled Order Members might go into a panic if they realised Sam had touched a probably cursed object they were clearly so frightened of.

‘Very well. It matches the description. Please replace the cover, Mr. Winchester.’

Sam did so, careful with the cloth this time. As soon as it was covered, the atmosphere it had exuded diminished with it. Definitely a magical aura. And a dampening spell in the cloth, too, Sam suspected, despite Henry’s claims to the contrary.

‘Very good, young man. Now please, hand it over, and we can see to the proper containment. And then we can get onto the business of your initiation.’

Sam hesitated. ‘Why?’

‘The box is an object of great historical and mystical importance. We had tried to convince your grandfather to leave it here, where such things belong, for many years, but he refused to see reason. Said that it was a “family heirloom” and it would be placed in the hands of his descendants upon his death. I'm afraid, young Mr. Winchester, that box was a source of much contention between your grandfather and the organisation’

Sam’s jaw set in a hard line. ‘I'm afraid I'll have to abide by my grandfather's wishes. At least until I have more information, I cannot hand over something Henry entrusted to me.’

He picked the cloth covered box up from the table and stood. So did almost every Man of Letters on the room, except the man sitting at the head of the table, who remained seated, smiling indulgently.

‘Young Mr. Winchester, I'm afraid you've misunderstood. This organisation cannot allow something as dangerous and valuable as that box to remain outside our protection. It simply shall not do, my boy. You must understand. Your grandfather was estranged from us because of this issue, but your family is an old and respected one, despite Henry's… eccentricities. We are willing to overlook his indiscretions and allow you entry into our ranks, but you simply must comply with our rules.’

Sam took a step back. ‘This box, as you said, was a family heirloom. It was left to me, by my grandfather's express wishes. It has never been in the keeping of the Men of Letters and if that was not what Henry desired, it will not be in future. I am sorry if we cannot get past this, sir, but my decision is final.’ Sam turned to leave and found the way blocked.

‘As I said, Mr. Winchester, we cannot allow you to leave with that box.’

Sam was ready. Sam had been ready for a fight since he'd taken the box out of its coverings.

He charged the first man and caught him across the head with his briefcase. The second, he hit with the box itself and the man went down, screaming about the cold.  
Which confused Sam a little, since he now knew first hand that contact with the box wasn't that bad. But he had better things to do than ponder why the man had overreacted so harshly to the box. 

Sam had always brushed aside Dean and John’s snide remarks about the Men of Letters being a bunch of arrogant, lazy librarians who’d never done cardio in their lives and simply weren’t used to having to fight physically. But as he sprinted for the unguarded exit, his pursuers trailing far behind, Sam had to admit his father and brother had had a point.

The heavy metal doors slammed shut in front of him, and Sam simply punched out the single guard and heaved them back open.

Dean was waiting outside with the Impala just as Sam had asked.

‘Are you hurt?’ was his first question as Sam jumped in and they sped away. 

‘No. I was lucky to escape, though. They clearly weren’t expecting a fight.’

Dean glanced at Sam, and at the box still in his lap. ‘So, did you find out what it was?’

Sam shook his head. ‘No luck on that either. I should have told them I didn't find it and tried to gain access to their libraries to research on my own.’

Sam kept the other thing, that he'd touched the box and felt… whatever that was… to himself. He busied himself texting a warning to John from Dean’s phone, telling the other man to get out of the state and lie low for a while. The Men of Letters, librarians or not, could be vindictive, savage tyrants when they chose to.


	5. Chapter Four

They stopped to refuel and eat five hours down the highway, after a lot of looping and winding around back roads to throw off pursuers. Sam privately thought the strange, erratic route was more likely to stick out than just driving straight out of Kansas would have. If the car was being followed, there was little they could do other than ditch the Impala, but Sam wasn't dumb enough to make that suggestion out loud. On the second leg of the journey, Sam took over driving. 

‘So where are we headed, anyway? You said you had a safe house in mind. If I'm driving now, I need to know.’

‘Bobby's.’ Dean grunted before pressing his head against the window and crossing his arms in a way Sam remembered meant he didn't want to be disturbed again until he woke up. 

Sam figured Dean would have told him if Bobby had moved, despite the fact that they’d been headed in the completely wrong direction, if their destination was Sioux Falls, so he headed back out onto the highway and drive through the night, keeping up Dean's incomprehensible path to “throw off pursuers” mostly because he just couldn't see the point in arguing over it, no matter what he privately thought. Besides, the extra hours of driving helped to calm Sam down. 

Around two in the morning, when Sam was considering stopping at the next gas station for what must have been his tenth cup of coffee, Dean woke up. 

‘Swap over, bitch, my turn.’ 

Sam was so tired he barely remembered to shoot back the customary “jerk” and that more than anything made him realise how fatigued the hours of driving had made him.  
Dean did this all the time, Sam realised. Drives ten times this length, without someone to share the burden with.  
He wondered how his brother managed. 

The gas station Sam pulled into was abandoned, at this time of night, but open. Dean grabbed the necessities while Sam settled into the passenger seat. He was barely aware of Dean climbing into the driver’s seat and resuming their long journey.

 

Sam woke up in a dark room. He could see nothing, but he could sense walls all around him, trapping him, keeping him in this tiny, tiny space, and it was cold, so cold he couldn't feel anything anymore, and he'd been here so, so long he was so alone-

 

He woke, gasping for air, in the Impala. The air was warm and crisp with artificial heat and there was just as much space as usual, enough for even him to fit comfortably. Sam was suddenly impossibly glad he'd never been claustrophobic. He took a few deep, shuddering breaths. 

Dean, who'd seen Sam through more than a few nightmares after Mary’s death when they were young, knew better than to make him talk before he was ready, though he was clearly paying more attention to Sam than to the road, his eyes constantly flicking over the divide between their seats, head half turned from the road.

Sam turned to him. ‘Dean,’ he said. ‘There's something alive in this box.’

 

Half a world away, on three separate continents, three figures, cloaked in human forms, felt a change in the air, in the earth, in the atmosphere around them. 

‘It is on the move. It is awake,’ one of them whispered to her siblings, though she did not speak. 

‘Yes. But where?’ Her brother whispered back. 

The distances made no difference to the three of them. 

‘North America,’ the third, the eldest, spoke decisively. ‘We shall go after it.’

As one, the three of them vanished. They left in their wake death and destruction, burning buildings and bloody, defiled bodies.

 

John Winchester didn't get very far from Kansas before he was stopped. He did not, in fact, get any further than the outskirts of Lebanon. The men in suits who ran his stolen car off the road were unfamiliar to him, but he knew them all the same.

‘You may have caught me, but you won't get anywhere near my boys,’ he snarled. He would have fought, run, but he could feel the pain in his leg and back, caused by the collision, and he knew it was useless. He was caught. 

One of the younger ones sneered at John as he pulled a burlap sack over his head.

 

Dean hadn’t allowed Sam near the box again. The second Sam had told him what he suspected, he’d pulled over, taken the thing away from Sam and put it in a magic-suppressing container in the trunk, which he refused to explain the presence of in detail. “Shoes, Sam. There were goddamn shoes” was all he would say on the matter.

They’d finally stopped, Dean having intentionally overshot their turn off by a hundred miles or so, and rested for the night. Dean hadn’t said whether they’d be driving in circles again in the morning or heading straight to Bobby’s, but Sam hoped it was the latter. He was getting sick of the pointless evasive driving. 

But now, in the dark motel room, with Dean snoring away, Sam couldn’t stop thinking about the box. He knew he should be sleeping, or at least lying down, even if he wasn’t tired; he’d barely slept when he was supposed to during the final leg of the night’s journey, after all.  
Sam tried to tell himself that he was just too jittery, but really, he knew better.  
The box was calling him.

He stared out the motel window at the Impala, the box still inside it. It wasn’t going to let him sleep. He knew it. Whatever magic… whatever creature was inside that box, it had tried to reach out to Sam. It was desperate, and lonely, and it wasn’t going to let him go.  
He knew he should ward himself up and try to find a way to block the creature out. But he couldn’t help feeling curious about it, almost sorry for it, despite Henry’s warnings and his own senses. It had felt so isolated. Sam could remember feeling a taste of the loneliness he'd sensed in the box, once, in the dark years after Mary had died and John had lost his mind. Before Henry had taken him in. It was hard for him to inflict the same pain on another sentient creature, without knowing why. 

Sam took a deep breath in, and made up his mind. He stood up and walked out the door.

The parking lot was freezing at this time of night. Sam’s footsteps crunching on the gravel were the only sounds around as he crossed to the Impala and opened the trunk.  
The box was there, in its containers. Sam pulled it out, and, against his better judgement, laid his palm flat on the surface.

_He was back, in the cold place, the tiny, frozen prison, and this time he was ready for it. It wasn't quite so overwhelming now. The being was there again, with him, and this time it was curious, hopeful, and the despair wasn’t quite as oppressive. It reached out to Sam, hesitantly, and it was too much, the thing was too vast, too otherworldly, too bright, he couldn’t be near it-_

 

Sam pulled his hand away and came back to the world around him, gasping. He was shivering, though it wasn’t cold in the real world- the early morning chill of the car park didn't compare to the blistering, all-encompasssing blizzard that was in the box. He took a few deep breaths in and reached out again.

 

_Confusion, doubt, sadness. Alone again. The contact, so longed for, so wonderful, had gone again, and it wasn’t coming back again, he was sure. Maybe it had been a dream, after so long, a sign that even he had been defeated by the solitude, the loneliness, and he was hallucinating a companion-_

‘Hello?’ Sam whispered at the creature the second he was able to distinguish its thoughts from his own. He wondered if it understood, if it could actually hear his words. He could feel its emotions, alien and muddied by the cage walls between them, and what he felt now was shock, followed by elation, so much Sam thought his heart would burst, and hope.

‘Hello,’ the thing whispered back.

Eyes opened, a hundred of them, a thousand, and stared at Sam, each one like a constellation, a galaxy, trapped in a fishbowl, blue like nothing Sam had ever seen, and vast, belonging to a creature he couldn’t begin to comprehend, and the voice, the voice was like nothing Sam had ever heard, booming and wailing and whispering and shouting and singing and screaming all at once. It was the voice of a shard of glass, the voice of a mountain, of the Sun and the Moon, and it was too much.

‘I can’t… I’m sorry. I’ll be back later,’ Sam gasped and-

 

-he pulled away from the box again, shaking and breathing in loud gasps.

Sam was sure the creature had understood him, had welcomed his intrusion into its… prison? The box certainly wasn’t home to it, Sam was sure of that. It had certainly seemed upset at his departure, and more than joyful when he’d come back. But it wasn’t human, wasn’t anything that had ever been close to human. It was vast beyond comprehension, and powerful to match.  
It couldn’t be trusted. It shouldn’t be communicated with, the contact was too risky.

Trembling, Sam covered the box again and closed the trunk of the car before collapsing onto the gravel and resting his head on his arms.


	6. Chapter Five

Singer Salvage Yard hardly seemed to have changed in the decade since Sam had seen it.

Bobby had always had more of a bond with Dean than with Sam, and when Sam had begun to see Henry instead of Bobby as his substitute father, that divide had only widened. The two hadn’t spoken, just passed occasional messages through Dean, since Sam had left the life as a teenager. 

‘Don’t mention the cane,’ Dean hissed as they walked towards the house.

‘Of course not,’ Sam whispered back, putting as much indignation as he could into the hushed words.

‘He’s kind of sensitive about it. Demon hunt gone wrong. Bobby got possessed and Rufus trapped him and exorcised it. The damn smoker tried to take Bobby out with it. His back’s been shot ever since.’

Bobby came into view, then, scowling and leaning on his cane. Without the stick, Sam would barely have registered the man had gotten any older. ‘Sam?’ Bobby squinted at him. He sounded incredulous.

Thinking back on the thirteen year old runt of a boy Sam had been when they’d last met, Sam wasn’t surprised Bobby didn’t recognise him.

It wasn’t often, these days, Sam felt anything other than awkward about his height. It was useless and often got in his way in the office, made it impossible for him to blend in, made him frequently hit his head on the tops of doorframes if he wasn’t looking. But the clear shock on Bobby’s face was oddly satisfying. Sam towered over the elder hunter, grinning proudly.

‘Nobody told me you turned into a giant,’ Bobby said, craning his head up. ‘Don't be expecting extra food just because you didn't have the decency to stop growing when the rest of us did.’

Sam grinned and leaned down to hug Bobby. The gruff older hunter hadn’t changed at all.  
After a few seconds, Bobby and Dean both started making awkward shuffling motions and Sam figured he’d exceeded the hunter hug time limit and let go.

 

They went indoors and Dean headed straight for the fridge, barely pausing to drop his bags by the staircase. Sam hung back, awkwardly holding the box as if Bobby was going to snatch it the second he left the room.  
Which was ridiculous for a number of reasons, but nevertheless Sam felt… attached, for some reason.  
He really hoped it was a reaction to everything that had happened in the last few days and not due to the thing inside the box exerting influence over him.

Bobby was staring at the box, or at the curse container Sam was carrying it in. ‘Sam, why the hell would you carry that in here? I don't want a cursed object in my damn house.’

Dean came back in with beers and started talking before Sam could, glaring at his brother when he tried to interject. He did manage to give a fairly objective account of what had happened, though, so Sam didn't complain. 

Bobby, of course, called them both idjits and complained that they should have at least called ahead, before retreating to his disaster zone of a library to look for anything that could be relevant. Two hours of searching, punctuated by the occasional curse, yielded nothing, and Bobby gave up for the day and put both boys to work in his yard. 

 

Sam hesitated over where to put the box while he slept. For some reason he was reluctant to leave it downstairs with Bobby. But Dean wouldn't be happy if Sam took it to his room, especially after the conversation they'd had about it the night before. 

Eventually Sam decided Dean could just deal and placed the box on his night stand, still in its loose wrapping, but without the outer container, which Sam had taken off so Bobby could see the real box for himself.  
Sam tried to pretend he wasn't going to touch it again, but he could already feel it calling him, drawing Sam to it like a magnet. He could almost hear whispering in the back of his mind, urging him closer, towards the being living in the tiny, metallic cage on Sam’s nightstand. But Sam was tired, and he didn't want to deal with whatever the thing was without a night's rest. He ignored the urge to touch the box and went to sleep.

 

Sam woke up back in the motel room of the previous night, though it looked wrong, somehow, like everything was mirrored and distorted somehow. Like it was a dream. Out of the corner of Sam's eye he could almost see past the room, to where the edges of the illusion covered up the empty void he was trapped in.

‘Hello?’

Sam spun around to see a man, sitting, cross legged, at the end of the room’s other bed. ‘Uh… hi?’ he said, body tensing for a fight due to years of combat training, and yet for some reason Sam didn’t really feel threatened.

‘You are the new guardian of the box, aren’t you? The one who has been speaking with me?’

Sam nodded. ‘And you’re the thing inside it? You look… more human than I expected.’

The being seemed almost insulted at that. ‘To your limited perception, maybe. You’d be wrong, though. I am the furthest possible thing from human.’

‘I didn’t say you were human… It’s just that after last time I was expecting you to look like Cthulhu or something.’

The reference, of course, went right over the head of Sam’s companion. ‘Who?’

‘Er… An… It’s not important. I meant, I was expecting tentacles and scales and too many eyes. But you don’t look scary at all.’ Sam cleared his throat, trying to regain his composure. ‘You just surprised me. ’

The man shrugged. ‘This is not my true form. You wouldn’t be able to comprehend that. It’s just a projection based on a form I assumed many years ago.’

Now it was Sam’s turn to be confused. ‘Uh, ok.’ He looked around the room, searching for something to make the conversation less awkward. Settling on the motel kitchenette, or the dream version of it, he had an idea. ‘Would you like some tea?’ he asked the being.

The creature, or the image the creature chose to project, as it had said, frowned and tilted its head to one side. ‘Tea?’ it asked, uncomprehendingly.

Sam hadn’t been expecting that. Obviously the being had been locked in the box for a lot longer than he’d assumed. He tried to cover his surprise, though he suspected the being was more aware of Sam’s emotions than it was letting on.

‘Yeah, it’s a drink. Here, I’ll show you.’ Sam busied himself with making the drink for a minute while he forced himself to be calm. Clearly placing the box on his bedside table had been a mistake. But it was too late now, and he’d just have to hope he was allowed to leave eventually, when his new companion was done with him.

The being sipped at his tea, gingerly, as if he was expecting it to bite him. Unsure what he would like, Sam had given him sugar, but no milk, simply because that was how he drank his own tea. There was a surprising amount of tea drinking involved in being a lawyer, especially when interviewing clients or witnesses- anyone Sam had to get information from. 

‘Interesting,’ the being said, after a minute.

‘You like it?’ Sam asked. If the being did, it might decide to accept the drink as an offering, and a lot of powerful otherworldly beings were big on offerings. That could only be a good thing.

The man smiled, and it gave Sam the sense he was being laughed at. ‘I believe so. Much better than any other experience with human drinks I've had. The last thing I was given to drink by one of your kind was a bowl of rotten fruit juice. I believe it was the effect it bad on the human brain that was considered enjoyable, rather than the taste. I was unable to share that part of the experience, and so it held little interest for me. 

Sam blinked. ‘Uh… I think technology must have come a long way since you last tried human drinks. Although we do still like our alcohol.’

The man, or the man-shaped being, Sam supposed, nodded sagely and took another sip of tea. He held the cup almost daintily, Sam noticed, his attention caught on the man’s long, calloused fingers. Sam's face reddened slightly as he tore his gaze away from the being’s hands. They drank their respective cups in silence, each regarding the other silently.  
The being appeared nondescript, a fairly average looking, seemingly human man. He was white, had vaguely Germanic features, blond hair and chilling blue eyes. The eyes were the only hint of what he was, not that Sam could match them to any description he'd ever come across. They seemed to glow, subtly, almost like they were chips of coloured glass over a lantern. Sam wondered, it he stared long enough, whether he'd be able to see through them to the creature beyond.

A lot of supernatural creatures could be identified through their eyes. But never had Sam read a description of one that matched the man before him.

‘I’m Sam,’ he told the man, as he took his last gulp of tea. ‘Henry, the previous… guardian, as you put it, died a few days ago. I’m his grandson.’

The man tilted his head to one side, slightly, making the moonlight that lit the dream room catch in his pale hair. ‘I am sorry to hear about your loss. However, it means little to me. Henry never spoke to me. Never tried. He accidentally touched the Cage once, I believe, unless it was his predecessor, and the experience, the sensations, overwhelmed him. He never came close to it again. That was many years ago, as you would think of it.’

Sam thought about that. Henry had told him to ignore the box talking to him, but it didn't honestly sound like Henry himself had had a good basis for that edict, other than the disorientation of first being in here. ‘Well, Henry left me the box for the rest of my life. And I'm not as opposed to talking to you as he was, so I assume I’ll be seeing a lot of you. So… Could we trade stories, or something?’

The being looked suddenly wary. ‘What would you want to know?’

‘Your name, what you are, why you're in here, you know, the basics.’

The being smiled. ‘Know thy enemy, is that what you want, Sam?’

‘Are you?’ Sam tried to keep his voice neutral. ‘An enemy, I mean.’

The being tilted his head thoughtfully. ‘I don't know.’

Sam nodded, accepting that for now. ‘Well, is there anything else you can tell me that might help me decide? A name, maybe?’

‘How about why I'm in here?’

Sam recognised the deflection, but let it pass. That had been one of his questions anyway, and names had power, for magical creatures. Bound and powerless as it was, maybe it just didn't want to hand over that last scrap of knowledge and render itself truly helpless.  
He nodded, shifting on the bed and leaning forward to look more attentive. It worked. The creature seemed to enjoy having an audience. 

‘I was a warrior, a general, really. My father and all of my brothers were united against my aunt and her children. We had been fighting for many, many years, and the war was almost over.’

Sam's mind raced, but so far the story wasn't matching anything he knew from history or mythology. 

‘There was a battle. It was going to be the last. My father and his sister had disappeared, and her forces were losing. But at this last battle, none of my brothers turned up. It was a trap. Still, I fought, I killed, and I won. I cut down all but four of my aunt's children, and the rest would have fled. But my brother…’

The room suddenly turned frosty and Sam drew back, alarmed, as the being's eyes flashed eerie blue and his voice dropped to an angry hiss.’

I was betrayed. By Mi- my own brother. He ambushed us while I was routing the enemy, with this… Cage in hand. He pulled the demons and I in, and left us here. He abandoned me.’

‘Demons?’ Sam cut in before he could stop himself. ‘If your cousins are demons…’ He stood and backed away, wondering if he could wake up by going out the door. He may have made a terrible mistake.

‘ _I_ am _not_ a demon!’ the creature snarled, eyes flashing blue again. ‘Quite the opposite. Being trapped in here with them was even more intolerable than being alone in here is now.’

Sam had never heard of a blue-eyed demon. And thinking over the being's original wording… he hadn't associated himself with the demons. He'd been fighting them. Not that demons didn't fight among themselves but somehow, Sam believed the being when he claimed he wasn't one. He relaxed as much as he could and sat back down, though stiffer than before. 

‘Is your curiosity satisfied?’ the being asked, still visibly bristling over the perceived insult. 

Sam thought about it. ‘I'll accept your story. But,’ he swallowed. ‘I want to know your name.’

The being shook his head. ‘Why don’t you finish your rest, take a day to think about me. See if you can guess?’ His eyes sparked and a smile played around the corners of his mouth.

Sam bit back his retort of “Okay, Rumplestiltskin”, knowing it wouldn't be understood. ‘Fine. But in the meantime, I'll have to call you something.’

The being shrugged. ‘It matters little to me.’

‘You can be Nick. You look like a Nick,’ Sam decided after a brief contemplation.

“Nick” shrugged again, looking utterly blasé about his new designation. 

‘Uh… goodbye, for now, then. How do I wake up?’

Nick’s eyes glowed blue for a second and the dream was suddenly over.

 

Sam sat up in bed, startled awake and breathing heavily. He looked over at the box sitting innocuously on the bedside table. ‘You’re really confusing, you know that? And being mysterious and vague is kind of cliche.’

He put the box back in its container, for Dean and Bobby’s peace of mind and so he wouldn't be disturbed again, before rolling over and returning to a more normal sleep.

 

In the morning Sam began researching the box again, now that he had something to go on and a different library to scour. Bobby's hunting books were arguably more useful than Henry's spellbooks and histories, for this task. This time, Sam started from the other end,researching magical containers that could hold a demon or something else of similar power, rather than focusing on finding something that matched the physical description of the box. 

A whole day of research turned up nothing specific, beyond fairy tales and myth. Sam was fairly certain that Nick was not a djinn. Sam moved on instead to identifying the species he was dealing with, but again, a djinn was the closest match he could find, the only creature consistently described as having glowing blue eyes and influence over dreams, not to mention an association in old lore with being trapped inside small containers. Sam sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. It could be an Alpha djinn, a much more powerful version, but that explanation just felt wrong, somehow. Sam stood up, his bones creaking in protest, and stretched. 

Bobby and Dean had both ended up fixing cars in the yard all day, as Bobby had orders that couldn’t be delayed, and would join Sam in research tomorrow. As the sun began to set, they came in, covered in engine grease.

Bobby frowned when he saw what Sam had been researching. ‘In all my years on the job, I've never heard of a djinn actually being trapped like that.’

Sam shrugged. ‘Every direction kept ending up there. Besides, I've never heard of anything being trapped like that. Who says it can't be a djinn? It certainly has enough finesse with molding dreams. And it has blue, glowing eyes.’

‘Tattoos?’ Dean looked up from the bottle of water he was guzzling to ask. 

‘Not that I saw.’

‘Not a djinn, then.’

Sam thought about arguing further, but he wasn't attached enough to the djinn theory to bother, despite it being his only one. Besides, he'd rather delay the fallout from Dean realising Sam had just admitted the thing in the box had been manipulating his dreams. 

 

By the end of dinner, Sam was back to his original idea, the very first thing he’d thought of when he’d translated the inscription on the box. It was still a long shot, but he uncovered the box before sleeping all the same, figuring he may as well run it by Nick.

 

The room this time was Sam’s office, at his house in California. The being, Nick, Sam reminded himself, was already sitting on the desk chair, staring around curiously.

‘This doesn’t seem to the the workspace of a Man of Letters,’ Nick stated neutrally.

Sam frowned. Maybe he’d been wrong. Nick wasn’t human, after all. Maybe he didn’t know about tea out of disinterest rather than because he’d been in the box since before it was invented. 

‘How do you know about the Men of Letters?’ he asked.

Nick almost laughed at Sam again. ‘You’re hardly the first guardian to break the rules and talk to me, Sam. Though you’re the only one who’s ever done it intentionally or on such a regular basis.’

That made sense to Sam, and he decided to accept it as an honest truth. ‘Okay. Well, I have a theory.’

Nick sat up slightly straighter and focused on Sam, as if to indicate the lawyer had his full attention, though his expression was still more indulgent than interested. 

‘There’s an old human legend that I think has something to do with you. I didn’t get time to look into it today, but I thought you could tell me if I’m on the right track or not.’

‘Could I?’ The being raised an eyebrow at Sam lazily.

‘There are men- the Men of Letters- chasing us. They want you. Unless you give me a good reason not to, I have no real motivation to not hand you over and go back to my life. So the sooner I figure out who you are and why Henry didn’t want you in the hands of the Men of Letters, the sooner I can start trusting you.’

Nick thought this over but seemed to accept it. ‘Very well. I will tell you if your story has anything to do with this Cage.’ The capital letter in “Cage” was as distinct as ever when Nick spat the word out. 

‘Thank you.’ Sam cleared his throat. ‘So, this legend. It’s Greek in origin. The story goes that there’s this box that is given by the gods to this guy, known as Epimetheus. No one knows what’s in the box, but he’s told never to open it. Anyway, his wife, Pandora, is very curious. She can’t stand not knowing what’s in the box, and the curiosity drives her to open it. When she does, she discovers that the box was holding in all the evil in the world. When she opens it, it escapes and curses the world forever. But left behind in the box is Hope, the thing that can destroy all the evil that was set free. The box was lost and the evil was never trapped again.’

Nick tilted his head. ‘Hmm.’

‘That’s all you’re saying?’ Sam asked, indignant.

Nick raised his eyebrows at Sam, and after a few more seconds of silence, began to speak. ‘Your fable is... based on truth, though heavily distorted. The couple you spoke of, Pandora and her husband, I remember them. They were, at one point, guardians of the box, like you, or at least Epimetheus was. Pandora was simply overly nosy and found it. Epimetheus was far from the first guardian, though, but it did, in a way, come to humanity through a higher power. And Pandora did open the box. I suppose you've guessed the “evils” were the demons I was trapped with. There were three. Lilith, Abbadon and Azazel. They escaped when Pandora opened the box, slaughtered her, and her husband, and most of the town. But it didn't “go missing” as you said. Her children escaped with it while the demons were recovering their strength.’

Sam frowned. ‘So if the box was opened long enough for all three of them to get out, why didn't you follow them? Why are you still here?’

The being's jaw set and it's eyes flashed again, bright blue and dangerous. He didn't speak. 

Sam folded his arms and leaned back in his desk chair. ‘You were too weak.’

Sam could swear the noise Nick made was an actual growl. 

‘I was not-’

‘You were. You were outnumbered. And the demons you mentioned, they're not regular demons. They're the Archdemons, the most powerful ones ever created. They're horrific, nightmarish monsters. Even I've heard of them. Hunters, even now, hear those names and run screaming. And you were trapped in here with all three of them. Even an angel would be weakened after-’ Sam cut himself off as his own words caught up with him, his eyes widening in shock. 

There was no way. No one had seen an angel in thousands of years. Even the Men of Letters only half believed in them, but the knowledge they did have all seemed to point to angels being the only things that could stand up to the more powerful demons and have a chance. 

Nick picked at the fabric of his pants, jeans, for some reason, probably because Sam would expect jeans, or maybe it meant Nick had been rummaging on Sam's head more than he'd let on. He pointedly didn't respond to the conclusion Sam had obviously reached. ‘I may have been… slower to act than usual. Damaged after many long, relentless years of battle. And that is all we shall say on the matter.’ Nick glared at Sam as if daring him to comment. 

Sam nodded once and moved on. There was no sense aggravating Nick's obviously wounded pride. ‘Alright. So you're an… an…’ Sam couldn't finish the sentence, countless childhood memories crowding back in.

Nick smiled, proudly. ‘I'm an angel, of course.’

The shock woke Sam up. 

 

His mother had been a believer, had had her faith despite the horrors she had seen in her life as a hunter, or maybe because of them. And in Sam and Dean's earliest years, they had both believed her stories about angels watching over them.

Until Mary had been ripped to pieces by a demon when Sam was six. Just a lone, weak demon out for fun, but all of Mary's hunter training, all her experience and the fact that she’s had her husband and partner at her back, John, by then a formidable hunter himself, hadn't done a thing to save her. 

John had gone around the bend shortly after. He'd pulled both his sons out of school and gone to Henry, stolen magical weapons from him and chased the demon across the continent for three years. When he'd finally caught it, Sam had thought it was over. They could go back to normal, have a house again, be a family again.  
But John hadn't stopped.  
After the demon there was a vampire nest, then another, then what John had thought was a werewolf but turned out to be a feral cat with rabies that had been wildly exaggerated by the media, then a wendigo halfway across the country, and before Sam knew it he was nearly old enough for high school and could barely remember his mother's face, and nothing had changed. 

That was when Sam had run. And John had never forgiven him. 

So now, now when there really was an angel right here with Sam, all he could think was _where were you twenty years ago, when we needed you?_

It wasn't fair of him, wasn't right to blame Nick for what had happened, but the boy inside Sam missing his mother couldn't help it. 

It didn’t mean anything, he promised himself. Even if Nick was really an angel, angels were bad news. They were manipulative, cold, uncaring monsters with unmatched power who regarded humans as worth little more than ants. The shaky, unreliable accounts the Men of Letters had of them all gave the same advice: run. If Nick was one, Sam had his answer. He should leave Nick right where he was inside the Cage, and bury the thing deep underground where it would never be found.  
And yet Sam had doubts.


	7. Chapter Six

Sam didn’t get around to telling Dean and Bobby what he suspected before a phone call to the house threw everything into disarray. Sam answered the phone when it rang, and the voice on the other end made his blood run cold.

‘Hello, Mr Winchester.’

‘How did you get this number?’ Sam was almost panicking. This was Bobby’s home line, not Sam’s mobile. The Men of Letters knew where they were. They must be surrounding the house.

‘Oh, don’t worry, we’re not interested in besieging that old junkyard you’re holed up in. You’re going to come out and hand over the box of your own free will. Then, maybe, we can overlook this little... tantrum of yours and your membership might even still be on the table. Refuse this opportunity, Mr. Winchester, and there will be no other.’

‘That’s it? You’re offering Men of Letters membership for the box? Did you forget I’ve already turned down that offer? No deal,’ Sam snarled.

The man chuckled in a way that made Sam uneasy. ‘I think you’ll reconsider. You see, Mr Winchester, renewed opportunity for membership is not all we're offering. How about… You give us the box and we return your father, alive. If not, we will leave him in pieces on Mr. Singer’s doorstep.’

Sam forget to breathe for a long moment. When he spoke again, there was an undeniable tremor in his voice despite his efforts to quash it. ‘I want proof you have him. Let me talk to him.’ 

The Man of Letters scoffed. ‘Very well.’

The phone creaked in protest under Sam's grip and he forced himself to loosen it. Inside he was burning with a cold, deadly fury. The Men of Letters had gone too far this time. Sam fought the urge to march outside and shoot them all. 

After a handful of seconds John’s voice, rough and weary, came through the speaker. ‘Sam?’

Sam let a breath out. ‘Dad?’ he swallowed, his throat dry. It could still be a trick. He had to know. ‘What was the last thing you said to me before I left for Henry’s, when I was thirteen?’ As soon as he'd asked the question Sam regretted it, but that conversation was swimming through his head. All Sam could think was that of he didn't save John, now, he might never get another chance to reconcile. 

John laughed bitterly into the receiver, until he broke off coughing. Broken ribs, Sam was sure. ‘I told you… If you were going, not to come back.’

Sam sighed. He wished now, more than ever, he’d made up for that at some point in the last decade and a half. ‘Dad? I’m not going to leave you there. Alright?’

‘No, Sam, no’-

‘Dad, they want some stupid box of Henry’s, not anything important. It’s not like the world is going to end or someone will die if I make the trade. I’m getting you back. Don’t argue.’

John fell silent, but a minute later he was replaced by the Man of Letters, so Sam didn’t know if he’d agreed with Sam or his protests had been silenced.

‘We will meet you at midnight, Mr. Winchester. Behind Mr Singer’s property. Come alone.’

‘Fine,’ Sam snapped and hung up.

Bobby and Dean, who were in the kitchen, had overheard most of the conversation and were quiet as Sam rejoined them.

‘I should have just handed it over to begin with,’ Sam muttered.

Bobby stared at him. ‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Henry asked me not to.’

‘And you don’t think your grandfather had a good reason?’ Bobby snapped back at him, incredulous.

‘Probably. But unless someone can tell me what that is, I don’t see why it’s worth Dad’s life. Henry wouldn’t want to trade his only son for the box. No matter how estranged they were. He wouldn’t. I wouldn't be following his wishes by keeping it now.’

Bobby grumbled, but gave in.

Dean, however, didn’t. ‘So you’re just going to go quietly? Join those assholes in suits, after they chased us across the country, cheated Henry’s will and kidnapped Dad? Really, Sammy?’

‘What should I do, then, Dean?’ Sam almost yelled. 

He was sick of Dean and John and the way they always assumed the worst of him. Sam was selfish, because he wanted to live in a house and and graduate high school and go to college. Sam was a traitor, because he refused to be a hunter. Sam didn't care, because he never called, even though all they ever did was fight.  
Of course he wouldn't join the Men of Letters, after this. But Dean, of course, didn't bother asking. He'd just assumed. Sam was betraying Nick, who'd never wronged him and who Sam was supposed to guard, to save John, and even if Dean didn't know it, now was not the time to accuse Sam of disloyalty to his family. 

Sam pushed his chair back. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he snapped, and stalked off.

 

Walking through Bobby’s maze of old, rusted, skeleton cars was more calming than Sam had anticipated. Each tunnel and passage through the steel and rubber labyrinth brought back memories of visiting this place as a kid, before he’d left John and Dean. Sam had played hide and seek among these cars. He’d been dragged off for tetanus shots after cutting his hand, somewhere over there. He’d broken his ankle jumping off the top of that truck, and Dean had carried him all the way back up to the house.

Suddenly Sam’s anger evaporated. He took a deep breath and turned around and headed back in.

‘Dean went to get more beer,’ Bobby said, not looking up from his book as Sam came in.

Sam thanked him and headed up to his room. There was one more person he needed to talk to before he did this, anyway, and the sooner the better.

Sam pulled the coverings off and laid his hand on the box. It was cold, colder than usual, enough to almost make Sam pull his hand away before he’d started. But the presence was there.

 

_-Cold, so cold, and so lonely, he’d been hopeful, he'd been… happy, happier than he'd been in countless aeons, and now Sam wasn’t coming back, all because he was just a stupid, miniscule human and he was afraid, he'd seen a glimpse of what he'd been talking to and he'd run away, he wouldn’t listen, couldn't understand, he was just like all the others, after all-_

Hello? Sam's voice seemed to echo, to boom around him and at the same time it was noiseless, silent, engulfed in the roar of the blizzard, the tornado, the maelstrom that was the other presence (not Nick, not when he was like this, a creature this unknowable, this otherworldly and infinite, could never be anything as mundane as “Nick”). 

The Other seemed to turn, to notice the tiny human mind sharing its space, and it reached out, indescribable limbs unfolding and stretching, and almost brushed against Sam's face, and it was too much, the contact, the touch of this thing-

Sam had to pull away and recompose for a second. When he replaced his hand on the box, he had had time to be completely sure of what he was going to say.

_Sam? The being spoke first this time, and its voice was like a symphony, like an avalanche, like the flutter of a bird's wings._

Sam wondered at how he could never fix on a description, even a metaphorical one, of any part of the Being. It was beyond his comprehension, beyond human knowledge, and Sam had no words to do it justice. 

Hi, Sam replied. I’m sorry, but… the men who wanted the box are here. They took my dad. I’m going to hand you over.

To his surprise, the response was not indifference or mild disappointment at Sam trading him away, but… fear.

Sam, please. Your ancestors took me away from them for a reason. You don’t know what they will do with me, with my power. They can’t be trusted. They will use me, they will drain me, and they will burn your world as they do.

Sam hesitated. I’m sorry. But he's my dad. Nick- I mean, whoever you are, whatever your real name is, you have to understand that. I can't let my dad die, when there's something I could do to save him.

The being did understand that, Sam knew. He could feel it. 

I know what it is to be loyal to a parent, to a family, Sam. But there are other matters at stake. The men you’re handing the box over to can’t be trusted-

 

Sam pulled his hand away, not wanting to hear this, and slammed the lid of Dean’s curse container down. He took a few deep breaths in and stared down at it. ‘I'm sorry,’ he said to Nick, aware that with the cover on, the being couldn’t hear him. It didn’t matter now, anyway.  
He was just trying to convince himself.

 

Night fell, and Sam wasn’t any less doubtful than earlier. The being’s words kept running through his mind.

Was this the right thing to do? The Men of Letters had proven themselves untrustworthy already. And if they just wanted the box put in their storage, locked away in a dusty back room in an artefact vault, surely it wasn’t worth such great effort to obtain? The Men of Letters had remained in the shadows for so long, surely they wouldn’t risk moving openly for one magical object, even if it was something as historically significant as Pandora’s Box.

 

Dean returned from whatever bar he’d hidden in two hours after sunset. Sam had the box on the kitchen table, in its trappings, and was sitting staring at it.

Dean walked to the fridge and pulled out another beer, sullen and silent.

‘I won’t join the Men of Letters,’ Sam broke the silence.

Dean just looked at him.

‘Not after the way they’ve acted. And Henry quit long before he died, anyway. I’m not sure if you knew.’

Dean nodded.

‘So if you’re worried I’ll leave you again for them, after this is over’-

‘What does it matter where you go? You’re still leaving. Kansas, California, who cares, Sam.’

‘What, you want me to be a hunter again?’ Sam scoffed.

Dean didn’t respond, but turned his back on Sam. ‘Just forget it. You’re right, Sammy, this isn’t your life anymore. Just go back to your perfect little lawyer world and forget about us all over again.’

Sam grabbed the box, defeated, and walked out. Sitting out at the meeting point for hours was better than arguing with Dean yet again.

 

The Men of Letters were right on time. Sam stood up straight, shifting the covered box in his hands so it was more visible, the second they came into view. 

‘Hello, Samuel,’ the leader said. 

Behind him he was dragging a man with rope around his wrists and a sack over his head. John, Sam assumed, though in the flimsy light provided by the crescent moon, he couldn't tell. 

The prisoner was pushed forward and onto his knees.

‘Now, I believe you know all the terms. So, hand over the box, we’ll let your father go, and we can put this nasty business behind us, and get back to the matter of your induction into the Order.’

‘Yeah, about that. I’m not really sure I want to join you after this, so how about you just fuck off after you give dad back?’

There was muttering among the assorted Men of Letters.

‘My dear boy,’ the leader began condescendingly. ‘You must understand you’re a security risk. If you’re not loyal to us, we can’t simply let you go. You have Winchester blood and knowledge of the locations of our bases. You’re a threat to us if we let you remain outside.’

Sam gritted his teeth. ‘Well, you should have thought of that before you threatened my family and chased me across the country. If you were expecting me to ever be loyal to you after this, you’re delusional.’

The man frowned. ‘You’re young, my dear boy. I’m sure, in time, you will come to see reason.’

Sam sighed internally. ‘Just give John back. I’m not interested in this discussion.’

John was shoved forward. Sam dropped the box on the ground and pulled John to his feet, pulling the bag off his head.

John’s eyes were bright, sickly yellow. He began to laugh, loudly and in a way so unlike John it would have alarmed Sam even without the eyes. ‘Surprise!’

Sam stumbled backwards, overbalancing and landing on his elbows in the dust. He knew those eyes, that laugh, if only by reputation, and dread pulsed deep in his stomach at what he remembered. 

The Men of Letters were similarly alarmed, though trying to keep up face regardless. ‘Azazel. What are you doing here? This is no business of yours.’ the leader said.

‘I’m the King of Hell,’ the creature wearing John’s face- Azazel- spoke, spinning his head to look at the men behind him. ‘Everything is my business if I say it is.’

Sam knew that name and the confirmation of what he'd guessed was no comfort. He’d seen a sketch of those eyes, in a different face, seen photos of the carnage this demon left behind. He backed up as far as the box and hoped the archdemon would focus on the Men of Letters.

Some of the Men of Letters were pulling out rosaries, flasks of what Sam assumed was Holy Water. Sam wasn’t as prepared. Not that it would matter. Those were weapons for lesser demons and they were unreliable even with them.  
‘Don’t go anywhere, Sammy-boy. I’m here for that box, killing some Men of Letters is just a bonus.’

There went Sam’s hope that he could escape during the fighting.

‘Azazel, surely we can be reasonable. We weren’t aware the box was important to you. You can have it. Think of it as a gift. We can part as friends.’

Sam didn’t audibly snort, but it was close.

Azazel just laughed.

‘Really, Philip. I expected better. You know damn well what’s in that box. You know why I want it. And you know I’m not going to let you walk away. I haven’t had a proper slaughter of your kind in years.’

Azazel pounced. Blood flew everywhere. Sam tried to run, struggling against what he thought at first was fear-induced inertia. It quickly became apparent that it was a telepathic hold and Sam fought harder. The sheer power it would take to maintain a spell like that while also fighting multiple opponents told Sam how hopeless it was. But he was a Winchester, and Winchesters did not submit to demons. 

The fiend took his time, and that was Sam's saving grace. Sam’s rescue had time to arrive.

Azazel's carnage was interrupted when the Impala roared into the clearing, colliding with the melee and sending the king of Hell flying. The impact with the car broke Azazel’s hold on Sam and he was up instantly, grabbing the box and diving for the Impala’s passenger seat. Dean didn’t stick around for another shot at Azazel, just turned the car and floored the accelerator.

 

They'd been driving blindly east for almost an hour when Dean finally exploded. ‘What the fuck, Sam? What was that?’

Sam just helplessly shook his head. ‘I don’t know what happened. It started going sideways fast- they weren’t going to let me leave, they were about to issue a join or die ultimatum, but they handed Dad over, I was about to give them the box and then suddenly a demon decided to show itself? It must have possessed him while they had him, because it wanted the box and it could have taken it from us if it was in dad before that.’

Dean was silent for a moment before he repeated, face turning pale. ‘Dad was possessed?’ 

‘I've heard of the demon, Dean. One of the big ones. Azazel.’

Just a glance at Dean's sickly face told Sam he'd heard of Azazel too.

‘If he wants the box, we’re in trouble. I don't know how long we can hide from him, if at all. He can't be killed, he's too powerful for any weapon I've ever heard of to make a dent.’

Dean breathed out slowly. ‘Why would he want the box?’

‘He said it was the reason he was there,’ Sam considered the problem, looking down at the box sitting innocuously on his lap. ‘The thing inside it, it said it could be drained of power. The same reason the Men of Letters wanted it. I get the feeling it meant a lot of power. And… Azazel was trapped in this box once, too. He might be holding a grudge.’

‘Great,’ Dean snapped. ‘The King of Hell has it in for us and your little pet. Best day of my life. You know, even if I hadn't just used Baby as a battering ram. Gonna be cleaning librarian blood off her for weeks.’

‘Shut up,’ Sam snarled as the rage he’d felt earlier suddenly came back to him. 

Dean looked startled at being cut off mid-rant. 

‘Dean… Azazel was possessing dad. And you ran him over with a car.’

Sam was sure there would be a seat belt shaped bruise across his chest the following morning, as Dean pulled over and vomited onto the side of the road. 

Sam pressed his face into the window, inhaled the familiar scents of leather and metal and Dean and John. ‘If we find him, exorcise the demon ourselves, before he changes vessels, we can get him to hospital right away. Dean, it might not be too late. We know the demon’s name, we can summon it when we’re ready. And trap it.’

Dean shook his head. ‘Sam, don’t. Just don’t. You know how fast I was going.’

There wasn’t really anything else to say after that. Dean kept driving until the sun came up, knuckles white on the steering wheel, face ashen.  
For once, the Impala’s radio was silent, and neither brother even noticed. 

 

When Dean finally pulled into a motel and parked, Sam's shock and anger had swelled into pulsing rage. He wanted to hurt, to lash back at the world after everything it had done, to rip and tear and stab at everything around him. He wanted to strangle the Men of Letters, dead already or not, for forcing him, his family, into this mess. He wanted to stab Azazel and watch him pay for what he'd done. He wanted to scream, to punch something until his fists were bloody, to punch someone until his knuckles split on their broken teeth. Murderous, poisonous rage coiled inside Sam, just waiting for an outlet, and his whole body burned with it. 

Dean managed to sleep. How he did so was beyond Sam, but it meant he would have the chance he needed to talk to Nick. 

He uncovered the box, the tiny, stupid little frozen chunk of metal, and considered throwing it at the wall. Putting it underneath the Impala's tires and rolling backwards. Putting it in the microwave in the motel room to see if the heat would cook the useless, pathetic excuse for an angel inside. 

_Anxiety, sadness, defiance, the being was feeling trapped, enraged, more so than usual._  
Sam's own directionless fury rebounded off the walls of The Cage, howled and echoed through the angel’s own mind. With a hiss, the angel struck back, defending itself against Sam’s aggression, wings flaring and claws reaching for Sam's mind before him.  
Ensnared, the human began to feel panicked, the sharp edge of his anger fading. 

Get out, the angel spat before Sam was almost violent ejected from the shared consciousness of the box. 

 

Gasping, he pulled back, headache already pounding at his temples and the base of his skull.  
Sam cursed his own stupidity. He'd known touching the box created an empathic link between him and Nick, and he'd gone in anyway, full of malice and murderous intent. He was lucky the angel hadn't killed him on the spot. 

The pain in his head, combined with the exhaustion of the day and the shock of being thrown out of the Cage so abruptly, was making Sam’s head spin, and soon he collapsed into fitful, restless unconsciousness. 

 

‘What was that?’ Nick was waiting for him, of course, sounding as unimpressed as Sam could imagine, the angel’s own fury barely reined in. 

Sam clenched his fists, belatedly realising he was still lying in bed, in his dream, and stood back up, suddenly needing to pace. The waves of emotions flooded back into him, now, not the simmering rage of earlier, but gritty, intolerable, roiling grief and agitation. He didn't want to hit anything anymore but he did want to run. 

‘I went to meet the Men of Letters. To get my dad back.’

‘To sell me,’ Nick interjected, almost peevishly. 

Sam ignored him. ‘One of your old friends came along for the trip. Azazel. Possessing my dad. My brother and I… to escape, we had to,’ Sam swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. ‘He… dad wouldn't have made it. He can't have. But we didn't stick around to even find out.’

Nick was silent. When Sam turned to face him, the angel was solemn, contemplative. ‘I am sorry that you seem to lose so much, due to me,’ he offered. 

Unable to meet Nick's open expression, Sam looked away. ‘Please, can you tell me the rest of your story now?’ he asked, voice quiet and broken. He had to know the truth. He had to know what he was defending, whether it was worth everything that had happened. 

Nick stared back at him impassively, folding his arms and squaring his body, denying Sam's simple request and suddenly Sam couldn't take it. The anger inside him roared up again until he saw red, and he snapped. 

‘This is all your fault,’ Sam hissed. 

He stalked towards Nick, who was watching him with more interest now, as if Sam was a pet who'd done something amusing. Sam was sick of it. Of Nick acting like he was in charge, despite being trapped, helpless but for Sam's protection. He was sick of going along with Nick's whims and letting him have his ways. In the outside world the angel may be infinitely more powerful than Sam. But here, it was different. Sam had the advantage. He had Nick trapped in a Cage, he had the power to leave the angel in a forgotten hole in the ground and bury him forever, making sure he would be in this box until the universe itself ended and he wasn't going to let the angel forget it again. 

Sam stood in front of the angel and pushed him, shoving him backwards hard enough to knock a human to the ground, or into the wall.  
The angel didn’t budge.

‘My dad died because of you. He was possessed by the same sort of creature he spent the last two decades hunting, and my brother had to hit him with a car to stop him from killing me. I've had people chasing me across the country, breaking into my grandfather's house, and threatening me, all because of you. And you won't even tell me your goddamn name.’

Nick stared down at Sam's hands where they'd grabbed his shirt to hold him in place, and it only fueled Sam's rage when he saw the smile on the angel's face, the amusement still dancing in his eyes. 

Sam punched him. 

It was like punching a mountain, but still, he heard the satisfying grunt from Nick as Sam's fist collided with his stomach.  
He did it again. And again. 

Sam could hear sobbing over the blood roaring in his ears and Nick wasn't crying, wasn't even a little teary. So it must be him. He lashed out again, though this time he barely even hit the angel, wouldn't have even made him feel it, and finally, Nick caught his wrist, held Sam's arm still until he stopped and collapsed, crying. 

Nick didn't move closer or offer comfort, not even an embrace. He simply released Sam's wrist and let the human sink to the floor and cry. 

When Sam's tears were spent he wiped them away and looked back up and Nick, trying to salvage whatever dignity he had left. ‘Thank you.’ 

Nick nodded. He didn't look nearly so amused now, and Sam wondered if he had been acting, earlier, to make Sam snap. 

‘You let me beat you up.’ Sam said, slowly. 

‘You needed it. As I am not able to heal your father, fix the damage done because of me, from inside this box, an outlet for your pain is all I can offer.’ Nick looked sincere, concerned. It was an odd sentiment, considering the source it came from. Angels weren’t known for their compassion.

Sam dragged himself up off the floor and onto the bed, where he could look at Nick without turning his head. ‘You could really do that?’ he asked. ‘Bring dad back, after Azazel leaves him to die?’ 

‘I could.’

Sam hesitated. ‘Would you?’

‘Of course.’

Sam stared at Nick. He seemed to be doing a lot of that, lately. The man, the angel, still looked ordinary, not at all like a being with the power to raise the dead, with skin like stone and bones like diamond. His eyes were blue, just like the eyes of his true form, the eyes Sam had seen when he’d touched the box, but there were only two of them, and they were the right size and shape. They had crow's feet at the corners. His clothes were rumpled and creased like he'd been wearing them for three days. His boots, ordinary workbooks, had scuff marks on them. 

Sam felt the outside world pressing in again, his memories of that night, seeing his father's body go flying, the sick crunch of the car's heavy metal colliding with human flesh.  
Suddenly he needed to forget. Sam launched to his feet and towards Nick, and pushed their mouths together.  
This, too, the angel accepted. 

Sam pulled him backwards, towards the bed, tugging at his shirt insistently, and the angel made no protest. He must have known he was being used, again, as an outlet for Sam's emotional turmoil, but it didn't show. Instead he lifted his hands to Sam's face and kissed him back. 

When Sam was pushing Nick down onto the mattress he asked again. ‘What's your name?’ 

The angel just laughed at him, and snapped his fingers, and suddenly they were naked. 

Soon enough, Sam forgot the question. 

 

When it was over, when Sam had caught his breath, he whispered again. ‘How do I get you out?’

‘Blood,’ Nick told him. ‘The blood of my vessel. That's how Pandora was able to free the demons. She was Lilith’s vessel, made for her by Amara, her Mother. To free me, you'll need mine, made for me by my Father.’

‘Alright,’ Sam told him. 

Nick was staring, staring through him at something Sam couldn't see. His soul, maybe, sappy and ridiculous as Sam thought that sounded. 

‘What's your name?’ Sam asked again. 

Nick leaned in and whispered a word in Sam's ear, and the shock, the betrayal, was enough to wake the human up.


	8. Chapter Seven

He came to, breathing heavily and sweating. His loud, shuddering exhales woke Dean.

‘Sammy? What’s wrong?’ Dean asked blearily.

Sam’s voice froze in his throat. ‘Uh… bad dream. Go back to sleep. I’m just going to get some air.’

Dean, not awake enough to argue, grunted and rolled over. He was snoring by the time Sam got to the door.

The night air was crisp and chilled and Sam could see his breath fogging. He sank down onto the dirt and tried not to hyperventilate.

He’d been talking, all this time, to Lucifer.

He'd had sex with Satan.

He’d made the Devil a nice cup of tea like they were friends having a pleasant lunch together.

Sam was glad he was already outside, and collapsed in the gravel so he could quietly panic for a while.

 

When he came back into the room, Sam shut the lid on the box, not willing to talk to the… angel again, just yet. If ever again. He was over his initial panic but his emotions were in a turmoil. 

How could he have trusted it? The story that Nick… Lucifer had told him had sounded so believable, so honest. Sam had wanted to trust. But now he knew better. The being he was talking to had most likely been playing him from the start. Even the emotional bleed-through was probably fake.  
Sam wondered why Henry hadn't warned him. He must have known something, something that had made him sure the box wasn't trustworthy. Sam just wished his grandfather had passed his knowledge along when he'd had the chance. 

Well, no more. Sam knew the truth now, and if Satan thought he was going to trick him into opening the box and freeing it, into bleeding another human being so the devil would walk free, that devil had another thought coming.

His dreams for the rest of the night were troubled, but free of Lucifer’s interference.

 

In the morning, both Winchesters were quiet. Thankfully, the car was not as bloody as Dean had thought, given it was parked in the open where any cop driving by could see. There were a few spots around the front wheels, but nothing they couldn’t explain by saying they’d hit a small animal. 

With Dean conscious and the two of them back in the Impala, it was much more difficult for Sam to shelve his other problems, however temporarily. In fact, the guilt of having done so, of forgetting his dad long enough to have had his romantic interlude with Satan in the first place, gnawed at Sam's stomach all morning. Maybe he really was as selfish as his family had always thought. 

Dean had the music blasting the whole way up the highway, not because either of them felt like it, but to stifle any conversation Dean wasn’t ready for. After three hours of driving, in addition to the four hours they’d done the previous night, Sam worked up the nerve to ask over the top of Metallica. ‘So where are we going?’

‘Away from Bobby’s. As far away from the demon as we can get. The plan was for Bobby to go south and us to go east if things with the freaking librarians went sideways. We might as well stick with that.’

Sam frowned. ‘You’re sure Bobby got out of the house, too?’

There was no response, other than a tightening of Dean's hands on the wheel and a muscle twitching in his jaw. 

‘What if… what if the demon went up to the house?’ Sam didn’t look across the car, knowing his brother wouldn’t react well to the suggestion but also that it needed to be considered.

‘Don’t,’ Dean snapped, and when Sam finally risked looking over he was white-knuckling the steering wheel again.

With nothing else to do, Sam’s thoughts returned to the revelations of the previous night, about the angel he was keeping in the tiny little box and what it had told him. He tried to ignore the rest of it, what he'd done, both when he'd attacked Lucifer and what he'd done afterwards, but in the back of Sam's mind the scene was running itself on repeat- the way Lucifer's body had been cool to the touch, all over, the curious, inexperienced way the angel had touched him back, the sensation of calloused hands running over Sam's shoulders and back as he'd moved. 

Henry had taught Sam about angels, of course, but Sam hadn't ever really believed him. If angels were real, one of them would have saved his mother, Sam had always privately thought. Though many in the Men of Letters questioned their existence, Henry Winchester was not one of them. They were the size of skyscrapers, the size of mountains. The more powerful ones were even larger than that.  
Henry's advice had been to run. If Sam ever even thought there was an angel around, run, and don't look back. They were volatile, powerful and unquestioning beings that could wipe out entire cities without hesitation. They couldn't be fought.

And Lucifer, one of the most powerful angels out there, had been crammed into a box barely the size of Sam’s head, and left there to rot. It was easy to understand the pain Sam had felt, the depression and loneliness that permeated the box whenever Sam touched it.  
Sam cut himself off there before he started sympathising with the devil again.

He’d lied. Sam reminded himself of that. The creature in the box was Satan. The Father of Lies. He'd purposely withheld his name to manipulate Sam into trusting him; the fact that he’d even known to do so, known that his name would scare Sam away, was proof that Lucifer wasn’t as ignorant of the world outside the box as he pretended, or, worse, every word he’d said had been a lie and the story he’d told about a battle, a betrayal, had been made up entirely. Sam couldn’t trust a word he’d said.

But his words still, even in the morning light, held the harsh ring of truth.

Sam debated telling Dean. Decided against it. Dean wouldn’t understand, and already disapproved of Sam having the box. It wouldn’t do either of them any good to talk about it.

Around lunch, they stopped so they could refuel and switch seats. When Sam returned from paying for their lunch and gas, Dean was trying to contact Bobby.

‘Dean?’ the voice that came over the speaker was crackly, distorted by distance and poor connection, or, Sam thought darkly, by demonic interference with the signal, but recognisable all the same as the wizened hunter.

‘Bobby,’ Dean replied, visibly relieved. ‘What happened?’

‘You two never showed, so I got the hell out of there. What happened, yourself?’

They told the whole story, and Bobby listened and only interjected with questions twice.

Throughout the call, Sam was listening, analysing Bobby’s tone, his word choices, for any proof of what he suspected. There was nothing.

‘Well, I’m going to join Rufus on the road. We’ll hunt for a while, lay low. Go back to the house in a few weeks and see if the demon left it standing. Where are you two headed?’

Dean, who’d been examining a map on the hood of the Impala, flipped a coin over it. ‘Maryland.’

 

The new destination was in the same direction they'd already been heading, to Sam's relief. They were almost halfway there, though Sam knew as soon as they reached Maryland they would be turning around and driving somewhere else, over and over until, inevitably, the demons caught them. Even with the hours of driving they'd already done, it was almost nightfall by the time Sam and Dean pulled into a motel for the night. 

‘I think we’ve gotten far enough to take a rest, Sammy. I’m going for beer.’

Sam nodded. He could use the time to research. On what exactly, Sam tried to tell himself he wasn't sure. But really, he was looking for more information on how to open the box. Just in case. Sam wanted to know who the person was. The vessel, whose blood could free the Devil. 

 

Angel vessels were a complicated subject. Like demons, they could possess nearly anyone who was strong enough, but some people worked much better than others. 

With just the internet to go on, Sam found no information on vessels that he didn't already know. In fact, there was less. Hunters didn't care how vessels worked and the Men of Letters didn't share their knowledge when they didn't have to. After two frustrating hours, Sam gave up and instead looked for information on the angel-demon war, a long-ago event that was only known to any humans because demons weren’t great at keeping their mouths shut under duress, looking for anything that matched what Lucifer had told him. 

Within hours, he’d found three different versions that he thought were worth closer examination.

In one, the archangel Lucifer had nobly sacrificed himself, casting himself into Hell to take the three most powerful demons down with him.

In another, Lucifer had betrayed his brothers and fought on the side of the demons during the war. His brother, Michael, had overpowered Lucifer and his three demon cronies and thrown them all in hell together.

The third story went almost as Lucifer had told it, except that Lucifer was not such an unwilling martyr. He and Michael worked together to cage the three demons, and Lucifer had fallen into Hell with them to ensure they stayed there. 

Sam sighed and rubbed his neck. None of the stories were likely to be true, they were the ramblings of desperate, broken demons trying to save themselves, he knew. But there were enough similarities that Sam was forced to admit that Lucifer may have been sincere.  
And if he was? Then he'd been the victim of the biggest smear campaign in history. If Lucifer was telling the truth, heaven, presumably under Michael's rule, would certainly have had reason to ruin their fallen brother's reputation, and the demons had probably just delighted on it for the entertainment value. And there was no evidence to prove Lucifer had lied, either. Sam was left with no answers and more questions than before he’d started, and a frustrating sense that he would have to talk to Lucifer again, to find anything more. 

So, reluctantly, Sam turned his thoughts to Lucifer himself. _The devil he knew_ , Sam mused to himself, and snorted. _Biblically_. 

But there were still things about Lucifer's story that didn't make sense. If he hadn't been supposed to end up in the Cage, why had none of the other angels freed him? Even if Michael hadn't cared enough to, for whatever reason, surely Lucifer hadn't been universally hated by his own kind? Sam resolved to ask the angel when they next spoke. Which, Sam thought with a glance at the clock, he couldn't put off much longer. His mouth went dry at the thought of seeing Lucifer again, after the previous night. 

Before sleeping, Sam read over the legend of Pandora's box, one last time. 

_‘And when Pandora opened the box, all the evil and horror that was held inside it escaped into the world and was free to torment humanity. When all was gone and the box was closed again, the only thing which remained inside it was Hope.’_

 

When Sam opened his eyes he was standing in the middle of a room  
Upon closer inspection he realised it was the last motel room, the one he'd been in when they'd… he smoothed his shirt down awkwardly, and looked around the room for Lucifer. The angel was standing at the small kitchenette behind Sam, examining the kettle. 

‘I thought I would make you some of that human beverage,’ the archangel said in greeting, without looking up. ‘You appeared to find it soothing.’

Sam smiled as Lucifer searched, obviously clueless about how tea was made but not wanting to admit it. He joined the angel by the bench, taking the kettle out of his hands and filling it with water. Lucifer had already found the cups, and Sam busied himself with finding tea bags while Lucifer watched, taking in Sam's actions this time. 

There was none of the tension, the awkwardness, that Sam had been expecting. Lucifer had welcomed him back into this space like everything was normal, and, somehow, in here, Sam didn’t mind as much that Lucifer was an angel, that he was Satan. It didn’t seem to matter, the way it had all day in the waking world.

Lucifer poured the kettle himself when it was ready, and handed the cup to Sam like it was a gift, a token of the angel's affection. Sam cut off that thought before it led anywhere else. There was no point pondering how Lucifer really felt about him, and Sam would never be able to discount the possibility that it was all a manipulation. Lucifer did, after all, have a very strong motivation to endear himself to Sam.

‘Say I decided to believe you,’ Sam began after a few quiet sips of his drink. ‘About your not being on the demon's side, and being in this Cage because you were betrayed.’

Lucifer tilted his head to the side. ‘Why would you not believe me? You have no reason to distrust me.’ Lucifer’s fingers curled around the mug like he wanted to absorb the heat in the cup into his own cold fingers.

Sam frowned. ‘The stories… in the Bible, is says that you’- 

Lucifer growled, cutting Sam off. ‘That book is meaningless propaganda concocted by Michael, or his lackeys, not our father, to keep your kind docile. I know what your stories say about me, and they are _wrong_.’

‘How could you know?’ Sam asked, taking the chance to get an answer to one of the questions he’d been thinking about all day.

‘As I've said, Sam, you are not the only guardian who has ever spoken with me. Usually as soon as I admit to my name they vanish and I'm left alone again for decades. At some point I managed to find out why. I am relieved that you are the exception. Losing your company forever would have been… disappointing, for me.’

Sam considered Lucifer's words. Put like that, he could understand the angel's reluctance to give away his identity. Sam recalled the overwhelming loneliness he'd experienced in his brief moments touching the box, and tried to ignore the stab of empathy he felt.

‘So what should I do?’ Sam asked. ‘How would I go about finding your vessel and getting his or her blood?’

‘You don't need to find him,’ Lucifer said vaguely. The angel turned away and sipped his tea.

Sam was about to ask Lucifer to explain that when the dream-world shuddered and broke apart around him.


	9. Chapter Eight

Dean was shaking Sam awake, and the sum was already shining through the thin motel curtains. Drowsily, Sam shook his brother off and rolled out of bed.

Over breakfast in the nearby diner, the Winchesters had a quiet, hissed argument. 

‘We can’t just keep driving forever,’ Sam insisted.

‘What else can we do? You can’t just go back to California, back to being a lawyer using your own name. Not with the King of Hell after you, Sammy.’

‘So, what, you want me to come on the road with you? Be a hunter?’

‘What options do you have?’

Sam sighed. ‘We’ll… find the demon. Free Dad. And decide from there. Maybe if I give up the box and lay low for a month or so it’ll forget about me and move on.’ Even as he said it Sam knew it wasn't going to happen. He wasn't going to just hand Lucifer over to Azazel. Not now. He couldn’t even say for sure what had changed, since yesterday, but something had.

‘It’s a demon, Sam. It’s not going to let you go back to your own life. Grow up. That’s over.’

Sam squeezed his styrofoam coffee cup a little too hard and hot liquid sloshed out over his hand. ‘I am not giving up my entire life because some demon decided to march in and throw it all up in the air. Fuck that, Dean.’

‘Great, so you can go back to your tiny little office and your suits and briefcases and be chased home by hellhounds every afternoon. Sounds fantastic, Sammy. Your wonderful other offer to be a Man of Letters seems to have fallen through, too. Why don’t you just come home?’

‘You and dad don’t have a home!’ Sam snapped. Too late, he remembered, and tried to backpedal, but Dean's face was already cold and closed off. He marched out of the diner, leaving Sam to pay. 

Their arguing, and the word demons hissed in undertones repeatedly, hadn't gone unnoticed. Across the restaurant, a blonde head turned to watch Sam as he paid and stormed out. 

A moment later, the table was empty except for a half-eaten bowl of cooling french fries. 

 

Sam stormed back to the motel, thinking of all the names he could call Dean for driving away and leaving him at the diner. Marching along in his angry haze, Sam took little notice of his surroundings. 

Half a street behind Sam, a local teen who'd snuck into an alley for a discrete smoke looked up to see a smiling blonde lady in a brown jacket staring at him. 

‘Hi,’ she grinned. ‘I'm going to need this.’ 

The boy never saw the knife coming for his throat. As he died, he felt the cool metal bowl under his neck, collecting his blood, and heard the woman chanting, but he couldn't make out her words. The cigarette slipped from his fingers and went out as it landed in a dirty puddle. 

 

Dean was half packed by the time Sam reached the motel. Sam's own stuff was packed too, he noted, a little relieved his brother wasn't angry enough to abandon him entirely. 

‘Dean… I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that.’

‘Say what? That you forgot dad was dead, or that you don't care enough to stay with your last living family?’ Dean didn't even look up. 

Sam sighed. His brother was the hardest person he knew to apologise to, when he was truly angry about something. 

‘I don't want you to be a hunter either, Dean. I don't want you and I to die like mom and dad did. And if I go with you, that's what will happen, eventually.’

Dean picked at a fingernail, still sulking and looking away from Sam. 

‘What else is there?’ he said, eventually. 

‘Henry left you his house,’ Sam reminded him. ‘You have options. You could settle down. Find a job that lets you stay in one place. Something that you won't kill yourself doing. There are plenty of ways to save people that don't involve getting eaten by werewolves, Dean.’

Dean was actually considering it, and Sam forced himself to clamp down on the sense of hope before it carried him too far. ‘I could move back to Kansas, start my own firm. Live somewhere nearby. We don't need to hunt to be a family.’

Dean turned and finally met Sam's gaze. ‘I'll think about it,’ he said, expression no longer bitter and angry. He grabbed the last bag and headed for the door.  
Or tried to.

As he reached for the handle, the door splintered and fell in. A red-haired woman strode into the room, her eyes flashing black and her mouth stretching into a grin that made Sam’s blood run cold.

‘Hello, boys,’ she drawled. ‘My siblings and I have been looking for you.’

Dean pulled his gun out and shot the demon dead in the center of her forehead without a second's hesitation, while Sam was still standing, petrified, in the middle of the room. 

The demon's head snapped up and she staggered backwards, a maniacal giggle starting to bubble out of her throat, but clearly not wounded. Dean shoved her away and jumped over her to run out the door. Sam paused only long enough to pick up the box before following, leaping through the mercifully open back window. 

Sam ran around the back of the motel to rejoin Dean before the demon did. Lucifer's box was bitingly cold in his arms, more so than usual, even through the heavy, magic-suppressing container. 

The demon appeared in front of Sam, cutting him off, between one blink and the next, still giggling. The bullet hole in her head was already gone. 

Sam skidded to a halt, the box slipping out of his grip and cracking on the ground. The demon screeched triumphantly and almost fell on the splintered container, tossing Sam out of the way into a wall. Dazed, he watched as the demon pulled the real box free, telekinetically. So she didn't want to touch it. Sam gritted his teeth, head still spinning, blood pounding in his skull, and lunged. 

She shoved him back without any apparent effort. 

Demons were strong, but this one was beyond anything Sam had encountered. The strength of her telekinesis reminded Sam of how Azazel had held him still as he'd butchered the Men of Letters. 

Sam stilled, a thought occurring to him. He examined the demon, looked past the modern, casual clothes, the hair done up and piled on her head, the makeup. He'd seen that face before, Sam realised. He'd seen what that face had looked like when the real owner had worn it. 

‘Abaddon?’ he asked, as the demon examined the Cage still floating in the air in front of her. The previously harsh morning was growing colder by the minute now the box was exposed, Sam realised. He could hear whispering, in the back of his mind. 

_-Touch it Sam, just touch the Cage, I can help, just let me-_

The demon looked up at the sound of her name. ‘You have done your research,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Henry's grandson? I suppose you recognise the vessel?’

‘I've seen pictures,’ Sam said, still struggling with her hold. If he could get to the box, he could get away, he knew. He didn't know how, but it was a certainty in his mind. Lucifer had a plan, Sam was sure. 

Abaddon moved closer, close enough to reach out and run a painted fingernail down Sam's face. ‘Just as handsome as he was, once. Did you know this,’ the demon gestured towards her vessel, ‘might have been your grandmother's body? If I hadn't snatched poor Josie here away from him, Henry would never have looked twice at _darling_ Millie.’

Bile rose in Sam's throat as he stared down the demon, her eyes hazel and round, hiding the monster inside her. Abaddon smiled wider as if reading Sam's thoughts, leaned closer to his face-

And gasped, letting go and spinning as her body jerked and blood sprayed from her neck. Sam felt her telekinetic hold break and rolled as he fell to the ground, diving for the Cage again.

Abaddon didn't stop him, temporarily having forgotten Sam in favour of snarling at his brother, gun still raised and smoking. Sam heard Dean fire twice more, saw Abaddon move behind him, and grabbed the Cage from the dirt it had landed in, standing and facing the demon again. Sam's bare hands slid over the smooth metal surface, and-

_-furious, terrified, frustrated that for the second time an archdemon had been within touching distance of their- of **Sam** , and they'd been helpless to stop it. But now, they could, now, they had a way of protecting both Sam and themself._

They pushed pure grace out of the box, unfettered now, and through the human touching it, through Sam, and wasn’t it lucky the Guardians had somehow crossed The Bloodline without Michael stopping the union-

-Sam’s skin began to glow, and without knowing why, he raised his hand, palm outwards, toward the demon. His hand shone, and his other hand, holding the box still, ached with the power being poured into it, channeled through Sam’s body.

Abaddon screamed, and she burned.

 

The box was wrapped up in Sam’s jacket, because sharing sensory input with Lucifer wasn’t something Sam could do while also listening to Dean’s ranting. But the jacket wasn’t enchanted like the old container had been and it couldn’t keep the angel’s thoughts from reaching Sam. Sam wondered why Lucifer hadn't been able to talk to him like this in the first few days after he'd found the Cage in Henry's house, before he'd put the curse-sealing box over it to begin with. 

_Our connection didn't grow strong enough for me to do this until after that,_ Lucifer informed him.

Sam wondered if that was a function of the prolonged contact he'd had with Lucifer while carrying him around the country or… the other type of prolonged contact. He decided not to ask. If Sam had given an Archangel a permanent gateway into his head just because he hadn't been able to keep his pants on Henry would probably rise as a vengeful spirit and strangle him. John, too. 

‘What the fuck was that?’ Dean was almost screaming as they sped away from the motel.

Sam was too busy wracking his brains to figure out how Abaddon had found them, and had forgotten Dean didn't know about Lucifer. He swallowed. He couldn't hold it back anymore. Not after… whatever the angel had done to Abaddon, through Sam. Sam was still a little panicked about that himself. 

‘It was- Him, the thing in the box’- ignoring Lucifer’s indignation at being called a “thing”, Sam continued. ‘An angel. I think he smote the demon?’

‘An an- a what, Sam? And what did he do to you? How does that work?’ Dean wasn’t calming down and his driving was erratic. Dangerous.

‘How the hell should I know? And eyes on the road, Dean, you’re going to get us killed,’ Sam snapped. To Lucifer, he thought _you’d better explain this later_ , and was met with mild exasperation and agreement.

‘I don’t know, because you spend all night touching the stupid box and talking to it, maybe? What the hell do you mean “it’s an angel”, anyway? There’s no such thing as angels.’

Sam fidgeted. ‘There are, actually. No one’s been confirmed to have seen one in hundreds of years, though, and no human can fight one, so the Men of Letters keep the accounts to themselves. They say it’s not worth confusing hunters with useless information but I’m pretty sure they just like their secrets.’

Dean swore again and Sam could have sworn he sped up. The scenery was flying by at a truly alarming rate. ‘Okay, fine,’ Dean spat. ‘Angel. That doesn't explain what he did to the Jessica Rabbit demon.’

Sam risked a look at the box. _A little help, please? I know you… used me to channel power, but how?_

Lucifer hesitated. _It's a function of our connection, and your contact with the box. Plus, you were in great emotional distress and opened yourself to my help. I likely would not be able to recreate the feat in calmer circumstances or for any lengthy amount of time. Not from inside here._

‘Sam?’ Dean demand again. 

‘He says he was able to channel power through me because of the extreme circumstances, basically. I don't think I really understand how the magic works, yet, but I'll talk to him properly tonight and find out. 

‘While you're at it, tell your damn pet angel not to go blasting demons through you again. What if it had killed you too?’

Sam shrugged. ‘It really didn’t hurt, Dean. I don’t think I was ever in danger from Lu-’ Sam cut himself off at the last second. One piece of information at a time would be easier for Dean. ‘It felt kind of cold, but not painful at all.’

Dean, however, was a hunter and not likely to miss such an obvious deflection. ‘In danger from who?’ he demanded.

Sam hesitated, making it worse.

‘In danger from who, Sammy, what’s his name?’

‘Lucifer,’ Sam whispered, not looking at Dean.

The box on his lap projected a feeling into Sam’s head which he could only label as smugness.

_You, shut up._ He thought at it.

Dean was silent for the thirty seconds it took him to find a place to pull over. His face had turned white.

Sam remained very quiet, letting Dean talk first. Unconsciously, he pulled the box closer to his chest.

_‘What the fuck do you mean “ **Lucifer** is in the box?”_

Sam winced. ‘Look, Dean, I don’t think it’s as bad as you think, I’ve been talking to him and’-

‘ _Yeah, I’ve noticed that. That’s stopping right now. You can’t **talk to Satan** , Sammy, it’s not right, he’s evil, for Christ’s sake’-_

‘That’s the thing, Dean, I don’t think he is evil!’

Dean stared at him incredulously.

Sam’s fingers tightened on the box. ‘He doesn’t- he doesn’t _feel_ evil. Or talk about taking over the world, or anything. He likes tea’-

_‘You made **tea** for Satan?’_

‘Yes, I- That’s not the point. The point is, he’s been in this box for longer than the Bible’s been around, and maybe he deserves it and I’m being a fool or maybe it’s the kind of history that was written by the winners and Lucifer isn’t what we think he is.’

Dean rubbed his forehead. ‘Sam… You’ve known the guy for, what, four days? Just… don’t do anything drastic until you’ve had a chance to learn more, okay?’

Sam nodded. He looked down at the box. _Don’t you get any ideas, either. This doesn’t mean I trust you, or I’m on your side or whatever._

Lucifer didn’t bother putting his response into words, but the sense of smug amusement he sent back roughly translated to “Sure, Sammy, keep telling yourself that.”


	10. Chapter Nine

It took almost an hour to find a place with undercover parking (the Impala was too conspicuous, now, even for Dean) and wifi so Sam could research.

As Dean got out of the car to try to get them a room, he tossed Sam his phone. ‘Here, call Bobby, make sure the other one didn’t go after him.’

‘Dean’- Sam protested, but his brother was already gone. Sam sighed and dropped Dean’s phone on the driver’s seat.

 _Don’t you need that to call “Bobby”?_ Lucifer piped up for the first time in a while.

Sam frowned, the comment making him realise belatedly that Lucifer had been able to keep up with Sam and Dean’s conversation without being told what was happening. ‘You can see out of the box?’ he asked out loud.

_… Sort of._

Sam prodded at the box and caught the edge of Lucifer’s false nonchalance and determination to skirt around what Sam had asked.

‘If you’re reading my mind or something else I won’t approve of, just tell me,’ he told the archangel.

Lucifer… fidgeted… in Sam’s head. _It’s not really any more than you’ve been getting from me, except that there’s more to see on your end. If you concentrated, I’m sure you could see the inside of this Cage clearly through my eyes. But your surroundings are far more interesting than mine._

Sam thought again about what it must be like to be trapped in a tiny metal box for millennia and for a moment, pitied Lucifer. The sharp spike of anger the angel projected at him when he sensed it was enough to quell the feeling, but the empathy remained.

‘Alright. I don’t mind. It’s not like you’re doing any harm.’

Lucifer sent waves of happiness towards him. _Thank you, Sam._

‘Right. Well, to answer your original question, yes, I would need that to call Bobby, but I’m not going to.’

_No? Won’t your... companion, Dean, I believe, be displeased?_

‘He will. He’s my brother, if you’re so curious. I’m not sure how much of our last conversation with Bobby you heard, since we still had you warded’-

_None of it, then. Until Abaddon broke the warded coverings I was quite in the dark about our surroundings, Sam. Even now, it’s only through you that I can see out of this prison._

‘Ah. Well, Bobby is the owner of the house we were staying in when the Men of Letters tried to take you and Azazel killed them. But his… host… got pretty badly damaged,’ Sam swallowed, looking away from the box and trying not to think about that night too much. ‘Well, I told you about that at the time, anyway. You remember.’ Sam cleared his throat. ‘And neither of us saw Bobby or Azazel leave, then Dean called Bobby and told him where we were going and the next thing we know, demons find us.’

Lucifer thought about this. _Have you told Dean of your concerns about Bobby?_

‘I tried,’ Sam tapped his knuckles lightly on the window, looking around for Dean. ‘He didn’t want to hear it. But I need him to face reality. I’m not calling Bobby again until we know for sure.’

_A wise decision._

The conversation died for the moment. Sam looked down at the box in his lap and pulled the jacket free of it. 

‘I wish these sigils could tell me anything useful,’ he said, poking at them.’

Lucifer hummed. _Did you translate all of them?_

‘Yes, That’s how I know they’re useless. They’re just vague warnings and poetic allusions to you and the three demons stuck in here. Nothing as substantial as names or specific instructions for…’ Sam bit his lip and stopped talking.

 _Instructions for what?_ Lucifer, of course, hadn’t missed that slip-up. _You’re not thinking about letting me out of my Cage, are you now, Sammy?_

Sam glared at the box. ‘Why do you always call it a cage, anyway? It doesn’t have bars or anything. It just looks like a solid metal box, to me.’ Sam pointedly ignored that he himself thought of the object as a cage at least as often as a box, by now.

Lucifer projected mild vexation and amusement at him. _From this side, that doesn’t really matter, don’t you think?_

‘Sorry,’ Sam winced. ‘That was a little tactless.’

The conversation was interrupted by Dean’s return. As he pulled the car away from the curb so they could park in the hotel lot, he glanced at Sam expectantly.

‘Dean, we can’t call Bobby,’ Sam said.

His brother rolled his eyes. ‘Sam, come on’-

‘No. Dean, you know as well as I do, you just don’t want to face it. Bobby may or may not be possessed. If he’s not, he will understand us not calling until this is over. If he is… we can’t take the risk. How did Abaddon find us, Dean? Who tipped her off?’

‘Abaddon? What, your little friend been feeding you information again? How do you know he didn’t call her?’

‘Because he’s in a tiny jail cell and he can hardly see anything outside it. And yes, he did tell me the demon’s name. That was a Queen of Hell, Dean. One of the big three. That’s why she shrugged off your bullets so quickly.’

‘Doesn’t mean Bobby sent her.’

‘Of course _Bobby_ didn’t. But Dean, she was Azazel’s sister. And he would have been looking for a new host, and Bobby was the closest person to him. You said he was going to wait an hour to get out. That’s too long, and you know it.’

They parked and Dean was out of the car instantly. He grabbed the duffel bags while Sam took the box.

They kept quiet until they got into the room by silent mutual agreement.

‘Bobby is not possessed,’ Dean snarled. His voice was low to keep from being heard through the thin walls, and angry.

‘Then he will understand when we call him in a few weeks and don’t give specific locations,’ Sam answered calmly.

Dean threw the bags onto the beds and walked out the door.

Sam sighed as he watched Dean walk away through the window.

 _You know he’s probably going to call Bobby,_ Lucifer chimed in.

‘I know. I can’t really stop him if he’s so determined not to listen.’ Sam sat down and dropped his head into his hands. ‘He’s just… because of Dad. He blames himself. I don’t think he can deal with losing Bobby, too, not right now.’

Lucifer had no response to that except to push waves of sympathy in Sam’s direction.

 

It was almost an hour later when Dean returned.

‘Did you call him?’ Sam asked as neutrally as possible.

‘Course I did.’

Sam’s jaw set into a hard line. ‘So, we’re leaving, then?’

‘Nope,’ Dean stretched out on the bed he’d claimed as his and pulled out an issue of Busty Asian Beauties.

Sam stared at him incredulously. ‘Dean, don’t you think you should be helping with research?’

‘What research? You think you’re going to find out how to kill a demon on the internet in the next few weeks, when no one’s done it in centuries? No, we have to keep this up. Stay on the road, keep away from the demons, until they find someone else to harass. Soon as it’s safe, we go back to Bobby’s and get dad’s body.’

Sam stared at him for a moment. ‘You do remember Lucifer killing Abaddon for us? It was only a few hours ago.’

‘What, so your plan is to lure Azazel here and hope he stands still for you while Satan turns you into his personal murder glowstick?’

‘Well, I might not have any other option if you just tipped off the demons to our location again. But no. Not exactly,’ Sam said vaguely before turning back to his research.

Dean closed the magazine. ‘Sammy, no. Bad plan. You are not opening the box.’

‘Why not? He can help. He’s done nothing harmful so far, and we’d both be dead, or worse, without him. Hasn’t he earned a little trust?’

‘He’s Satan.’

Sam sighed. ‘Dean… He’s been in this box for more time than we can possibly know. And his cellmates, the same demons who have been chasing us, escaped captivity thousands of years ago. They’ve had plenty of time to trash his reputation. Don’t you think the real thing might not be anything like the stories, when his enemies are the ones spreading those stories?’

Dean scowled. ‘And you’re willing to throw out every scary story you’ve ever heard, every piece of Sunday school crap we were fed as kids, based on the word of the Devil? Really, Sam? Even if he’s telling the truth, how are you so ready to trust him?’

‘I just… know. He’s not lying, Dean.’

Dean rolled his eyes. ‘How long is it going to take you to learn not to trust monsters?’

Sam clenched his jaw to prevent anything getting out that he might later regret. He focused on his breathing for fifteen seconds, the way Henry and his martial arts instructors had taught him, back when Sam was a teeneager with anger issues.  
Sometimes he wished Dean had had the benefit of those lessons, too.

 _Sam, if Lilith or Azazel do come looking for you, I won’t be able to stop them as easily as I did with Abaddon._ Lucifer chimed in in Sam’s head.

Sam frowned at the box. ‘Why not?’

‘What?’ Dean looked confused. ‘Because- because they’re monsters, Sam-’ 

‘No, not you,’ Sam waved him off.

Dean glared at the box and returned to his sullen silence.

 _Why not?_ Sam thought at Lucifer.

The angel radiated amusement at Sam.

_Yeah, yeah, you’ve been incredibly bored for the last three millennia and now Dean and I are your personal sit-com. Now, why can’t you smite Lilith or Azazel?_

_They are much more powerful than Abaddon. There were seven archdemons, originally, just like there were seven archangels, but we weren’t all created equally. Michael and I were the most powerful archangels, by far. I was powerful enough to fight hordes of demons alone and win. Of the demons, Lilith is the most powerful, my match. Azazel is the third, Abaddon was fourth. I can beat Azazel, but while I’m depowered he may pose a threat._

Sam sighed. _So, we just got lucky, before, with Abaddon?_

_She probably didn’t realise I could kill her from in here. Without you, Sam, I wouldn’t have been able to._

That comment demanded further explanation. Sam seized on it. _What do you mean, without me? I was just a convenient conduit for you to use to blast her, wasn’t I?_

Lucifer hesitated, but finally, reluctantly, answered. _… Well, no. There was more to it than that, Sam. I'd rather... tell you this alone, if that's alright._

Sam sighed and picked up the box, standing up. ‘I’m going outside,’ he told Dean.

Dean took the opportunity for a parting shot. ‘Fine, go hang out with featherbutt. But if you really trust him so much, why haven't you let him out? You have doubts too, Sammy, and you know it.‘

Sam didn't respond to that, and marched out, taking the box with him, which probably looked a bit silly, but Sam was beyond caring. 

_Are you going to tell me, or not?_ Sam thought at Lucifer angrily once they were clear of the motel.

_You won’t like it._

_I don’t care. I don’t like you lying to me, either, so deal with it._

Still, Lucifer hesitated, evaded. _Do you remember what I said about my vessel? That his blood could free me?_ The angel finally asked.

 _Yes._ Sam had an idea what Lucifer was about to say, and the angel was right. He didn't want to hear it. But they didn't have a choice any more.

_It’s you, Sam. You're the one. I don’t know why Michael allowed it, allowed my bloodline to cross his, but he has. You’re my true vessel. My only hope of being freed._

Sam felt… he didn't know what he felt. He stopped walking, stumbled to a nearby bench and collapsed into it, the box in his lap. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’he asked, out loud, not caring if he was heard.

_Why? So you could accuse me of manipulating you into freeing me? So you could throw me in a hole in the ground somewhere and bury me? I need you, Sam. I needed you to give me a chance. If I hadn’t needed it, I wouldn’t have told you at all, but there’s no other way for me to be free of this Cage._

Sam’s fingers were white where he gripped the box. ‘So you want me to bleed myself dry until this box opens?

Lucifer seemed startled. Of course not. The spell doesn’t require that much of your blood. Just a cupful, willingly offered, and the incantation spoken by you. That’s all it takes. 

‘How can that be it?’ Sam demanded, unbelieving. ‘One of the most powerful, secure magical lockboxes in existence, and that’s all it takes to open it?’

 _For thousands of years, before your birth, the box was impossible to open. Outside of the brief window of your mortal life, it becomes much more impenetrable. You overlook that it’s only easy because the you happen to have the most important, most difficult to obtain part of the key._

Sam’s fingers traced the lettering on the box. ‘What would you do?’ he asked. ‘If I let you out, what would happen?’

_I would kill Azazel, revive your father and your friend Bobby if necessary, and then return to Heaven. I would like to see my brothers again._

‘You wouldn’t… want to hang around, given the whole vessel thing?’

_Heaven is not so far away, Sam. I would be better able to protect you there than I am in here. You would not be abandoned._

‘That's not exactly-' Sam bit his tongue, cut himself off mid-sentence. Now wasn't the time for that conversation. 'You said Pandora, the last person to open the Cage, was tricked, by the demons.’

_Yes._

‘Because she was Lilith’s vessel?’

_I am not a demon, Sam. Surely you can tell that. But I cannot make you trust me. I can only hope that you will._

Sam sighed, and stood, turning back towards the motel. He needed time. He needed everything not to be happening at once, he needed to process everything that had happened with Lucifer, with the Men of Letters, with the demons, and with his own family, over the last few days.

Sam wasn’t going to get that time.

 

When they returned to the motel, Sam could instantly see something was wrong. The door was ajar and the window broken. He pulled out the gun Dean had lent him when they'd reached Bobby's out of his jacket pocket and tucked Lucifer’s Cage more securely under his arm.

‘If they’re in there, what should I do?’ Sam hissed.

Lucifer was silent.

‘Lucifer?’

_You know the answer to that, Sam. You shouldn’t go in there without me._

‘I can’t… Isn’t there anything else you can do?’

 _You know there isn't._ the angel thought bitterly. _You should concentrate, Sam._

When Sam entered the room, it was deserted. No demons, no Dean. There was a message scrawled on the wall in something Sam sincerely hoped was not his brother’s blood.

‘Wow, that’s not melodramatic at all,’ Sam muttered at it. He stared at the dull red writing.

 _They will kill you both anyway, Sam. And they will destroy me. You can’t do what they want._ Lucifer paused. _I can help you, Sam. But you have to help me, first._

It wasn’t really a choice, anymore. Dean would die if Sam didn’t trust Lucifer now. Dean might die if he did, but at least there was a chance.  
And Sam couldn’t let yet another member of his family die alone, because of this box. He couldn’t let the demons bully their way into taking it, couldn’t let this ridiculous squabbling over the tiny prison cell continue to steal the lives or people Sam loved. Either way, this was ending, today. Sam was going to end it.

‘Alright.’ He said, setting the box down on the ground. He pulled off the jacket still covering it and stared. The large sigil dominating one face seemed to almost glow. ‘This is your name, isn't it?’ Sam asked, tracing the sigil with one finger. 

_Yes,_ the answer came through clearly, as if touching Lucifer’s name sigil made for a better connection than other parts of the box's surface. 

Sam could feel the presence on the other side of the metal at his fingertips, the vastness, the alien feel of whatever passed for Lucifer's skin. It was like he was touching the angel. ‘That means… the box was built for you. Not the demons. For you,’ Sam swallowed. It was too late to turn back on his decision, there was no other way, to get Dean back, to end this. He had to keep his faith in Lucifer. ‘Michael really did betray you. He meant for you be be trapped in here.’ The alternative, that al of this had been a trick, Sam refused to contemplate.

Lucifer hissed.

The incantation that opened the box was a straightforward one, written in Enochian across one side of the box. Sam had thought it was graffiti or nonsense when he'd first translated it. He still didn't know what it actually meant. Lucifer was able to instruct him on the pronunciation and soon enough Sam could repeat the simple chant without faltering. 

The only actual ingredient they needed was Sam's blood, but the Winchester was well acquainted with that sort of spell. He breathed out slowly as he slid the blade across his palm, letting the blood drip into the elaborate sigil carved on the top side of the box, chanting the Enochian spell as he watched the liquid flow.

The second his blood touched the carving it began to glow, and rattle. The room around Sam began to shake, and the box was consumed in a flare so bright Sam thought it would blind him.  
But it didn't.


	11. Chapter Ten

Lucifer looked just like he had in Sam’s dreams. The clothes were different, sure. Instead of jeans and a t-shirt and boots, the angel stood barefoot, in a rough, grey, woolen garment Sam could only assume had been a more typical garb however many thousands of years ago Lucifer had acquired his vessel. In one hand he held a silver blade, almost long enough to be called a short sword.

There were no wings visible. Or halo. Or horns or trident or arrow-tipped tail, or cloven hooves. If Sam hadn’t known better, he’d have thought Lucifer an average guy. He was standing where the box had been, but now there was no tracer of it. No way back, if this went wrong. Sam guessed Lucifer had destroyed his prison the moment he’d been able to.

The angel, freed now, smiled when Sam met his gaze. There was no malice, or glee, or triumph in Lucifer's eyes. Just relief, and gratitude, and something like happiness. ‘Hello, Sam.’

‘Uh… hi. Lucifer,’ And now the apprehension hit Sam. He’d just freed the Devil. Satan himself. Lucifer. And Sam had let him loose on the Earth, intentionally.

‘So, is this the part where you laugh at me for being silly enough to believe you, and then destroy the world?’ Even as he said it, Sam's last doubts faded and he knew his fears were unfounded.

Lucifer looked offended. ‘No, Sam, this is the part where I help you save your brother. And then…’ He frowned. ‘I’ll find out where my family is, I guess. Find Michael, ask, to my brother's face, what happened.’

‘Okay,’ Sam swallowed and wiped his hands on his jeans. He realised he was still kneeling on the floor in front of Lucifer and stood.

Lucifer was shorter than Sam. Most people were, but it managed to catch Sam by surprise anyway. The angel smiled at him.

‘This vessel was considered exceptionally tall, six thousand years ago.’

And, yeah, he would have been. Not to mention his other qualities. Sam found himself looking away from Lucifer to hide the redness of his face.

‘We should hurry, if we are to save Dean. Archdemons are fickle. They may decide not to wait. Worse still, they may have felt the box opening. Do you recall the way to the place where Abaddon was killed?’

Sam nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s only a few hours drive. Why?’

Lucifer reached out to take Sam’s hand, and while Sam was blushing and staring at their joined fingers, the world around them shifted. In the space of a blink, they traveled from the destroyed, empty motel room to a parking lot hundreds of miles away. Two demons were standing just meters away, with Dean lying unconscious at their feet. 

One of them, the one with yellow eyes, was wearing Bobby Singer. Sam schooled his face, tried to hide from the demon how it affected him. Years of suppressing his rage, and practicing his poker face as a lawyer served Sam well and he controlled his reaction before it was noticed.

Instead, he looked at the other demon. The one who must be Lilith. She was wearing the body of a young woman, and she'd clearly tried her best to look innocent, angelic, but the effect was ruined by her eyes, demon eyes like saucers of milk in the middle of her face. There was dried blood running down her neck from her mouth and staining the front of her plain white dress. Sam's stomach turned in revulsion. 

‘Lilith. I take it you liked having a true vessel? It's not like you to keep one around for more than a few months, let alone millennia.’ Lucifer sounded as disgusted as Sam felt.

The demon shrugged. ‘She screams so pretty for me, even now. She's mad, of course, but she can still scream. It's like music. You like music, don't you, Hêlêl? Would you like to hear it?’

Sam thought he’d preferred her not talking.

Azazel took a step forward and kicked Dean’s body in the side, making a sick crunch as the hunter's ribs shattered. ‘Well, Sam, this rather complicates matters. The trade we offered you was Dean for the box. Instead, you show up here with an angry Archangel. I’m afraid we won’t be able to honour that deal after all.’

He placed a boot on Dean’s back and began to press down, intent on breaking the elder Winchester’s spine, until Lucifer growled at him. ‘Leave him, Azazel.’

Azazel laughed, and it sounded so little like Bobby it broke Sam out of his state of shock. It was the same cold laugh Sam remembered hearing from his father's lips, the night the Men of Letters had been slaughtered in Sioux Falls.  
Suddenly Sam could almost see through the vessel, past Bobby’s familiar face, to the demon underneath. The monster who'd killed his father, who'd wiped out a whole chapter of fully trained Men of Letters. 

‘You think you can stop us both, Lucifer, in your condition?’ Azazel grinned. ‘I’d like to see you try.’

Lucifer pounced at the same moment Azazel did. Light flared from the angel’s palms in bursts Sam would have thought were beautiful in other circumstances. Instead, he ran for Dean. Lucifer had hoped Lilith would join the battle, when he’d been feeding a steady stream of tactics into Sam’s head while they spoke. No such luck. She stood by Dean’s body, guarding him, and not at all distracted by the battle a few meters away. Sam stopped before her.

‘You have what you want.’ He bargained. ‘Let Dean go. Lucifer is free. The box, and the two of us, are worthless now.’

She laughed at Sam, and mimed backhanding him, or so Sam thought. A second later he went flying through the air as the full force of her telekinetic attack hit him. Sam hit the ground, head spinning. When his vision cleared, he saw Lilith advancing on him, at the same moment Lucifer pulled out the same blade he’d been holding earlier and stabbed Azazel through the heart. The demon screamed as he died, eyes and mouth glowing as his insides burned just like Abaddon's had.

Lucifer didn’t waste time, though, and the second Azazel’s eyes and skin began to glow he pulled his sword free and launched himself at Lilith. She cackled, again, not noticing or not caring about her brother’s death, and caught Lucifer, swinging him over her head and against the ground next to Sam. The impact didn’t appear to phase the angel and he was up again before Sam had registered him being down.

Lucifer reached out with his free hand, and grasped Lilith's face. She screamed as his hand began to glow and burn where it touched her. The Archangel was off balance, though, and weakened, and too soon, he had to let go of the flailing demon. She screamed again, staggering backwards as her body crackled and glowed with Lucifer's power. 

When she looked back up, her face was destroyed beyond recognition. 

The skin was mostly gone, and bones and teeth were visible through the bloodiest parts of her face. Her blonde hair was streaked with grime and gore.

‘You will pay, Lucifer, for destroying my True Vessel,’ she snarled, dark globules flying from her mouth as she spat the words. ‘I should make you pay in kind, but I think I’ll take him as my replacement, instead. As soon as I’m finished tearing you apart, Morningstar. My mother wasn’t foolish enough to force her children to play nice with the humans,’ she taunted, glancing down at Sam for a moment. 

Sam, his head finally clearing, ignored Lilith's threats and crawled towards Dean. He wasn’t at all convinced running would do them any good, but it had to be better than being caught in the crossfire.

‘You will not touch Sam,’ Lucifer snarled. He struck out at Lilith with his blade, and she knocked it out of his hand. It spun through the air and rolled across the dirt, out of the way. Growling like monsters, the angel and demon moved into close combat, ripping at each other with their hands and blasting flashes of light and dark energy at each other. 

The blasts that came from Lilith were made of void, of nothingness, and cancelled out every one of Lucifer’s attacks. The fight was going nowhere. Sam continued moving, dragging Dean away from the two fighting immortals.

On the ground, Dean stirred, opened his eyes briefly, then stilled. Behind Sam, Lucifer shouted in pain.

Sam stopped and looked back. 

The angel was on the ground, one arm trapped underneath his body and the other desperately trying to hold back Lilith as she held him pinned. His stomach, chest and arms were bleeding red blood and leaking bluish-white light. _Ichor,_ Sam’s mind provided. _Angel blood. He’s losing._

Sam made his decision. He put Dean down and scrambled back towards the fight, towards where he remembered Lucifer’s blade had fallen, and picked it up. br> The demon was laughing again, drunk on her triumph, and didn’t see Sam approaching behind her. Lucifer’s panicked expression when he saw the blade in Sam’s hand warned the human this was a bad idea. But he had no choice. 

Sam raised Lucifer’s blade and plunged it into Lilith’s heart through her back.

Darkness seemed to explode around him, and for the second time that day, Sam was thrown backwards. He dropped the sword, somewhere, and shielded his eyes and mouth from the bitter, rotting smell of Lilith’s essence. Before Sam lost consciousness, he saw something bright, something pure, reach out and catch him. 

 

‘Sam? Sam, are you awake?’

Lucifer’s voice sounded different now that Sam was listening to it with his ears instead of his mind. He hadn’t noticed that, before. Sam opened his eyes. Lucifer was kneeling over him in the parking lot, light still fading from his hands.

‘How long was I out?’ Sam asked, trying to get through the disorientation.

Lucifer snorted. ‘A minute at most. I healed you. You shouldn’t stand so close to a demon or angel who is dying. It gets messy.’

Looking around Lucifer at the scorched marks on the ground around Lilith’s body, Sam had to agree.

Dean stirred then, and Sam jumped up to check on him, noticing Lucifer quickly withdrawing his hands from where they’d been resting on Sam’s face and neck.

‘Dean?’ Sam asked as soon as the elder Winchester seemed coherent. ‘Are you okay?’ He looked over at Lucifer. ‘I don’t suppose you could heal him, too?’

The hunter shook himself awake. ‘I’m fine. Feel a little beat up. Where’s’- He caught sight of Bobby’s body and his face turned pale.

Sam went numb and cold inside as he remembered. He’d forgotten Bobby entirely, in the fight and then waking up to Lucifer healing him. He’d been selfish, again.

‘Oh for Dad’s sake,’ Lucifer grumbled. 

There was a sound like fingers snapping and abruptly the gaping sword wound on Bobby’s back knitted closed. The old man sucked in air noisily and sat bolt upright, staring around wildly. ‘Dean? Sam?’ he asked.

‘You’re welcome,’ Lucifer grumbled, looking away as the Winchesters rushed towards Bobby. 

Sam pulled himself away after a second, leaving Bobby and Dean together, and walked back to Lucifer.

‘Thank you,’ he told the angel.

Lucifer shrugged. ‘I did promise you I'd save him if need be. Besides, you freed me from the box, and you saved me from Lilith. I owed you. Twice.

Sam smiled. ‘So, you still owe me one favour?’ A second too late, he realised teasing an Archangel might not be a brilliant idea, Lucifer’s expression only confirming it when he turned his most terrifying expression towards Sam.After holding the expression for a mere second, Lucifer broke into a warm grin. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose I still do.’ And he was hesitant about it, but he still took Sam’s hand when it was offered, and allowed himself to be led over and introduced to Dean and Bobby.

Bobby just stared, warily, not taking the hand that Sam prodded Lucifer into offering. After an awkward moment, the Archangel let his hand fall again and he and Bobby continued their stare-off. 

Dean was staring too, but with an expression that alarmed Sam the moment he saw it. That was the face of Dean about to shove his foot not only into his mouth but halfway down his throat. 

‘So you were trapped in that itty-bitty box?’ Dean asked. 

Lucifer nodded, warily appraising Dean. 

‘And you're like a super-powerful archangel. You could even say… phenomenally powerful.’

Sam groaned as he realised where Dean was heading with this. 

‘Phenomenal cosmic power!’ Dean shouted before Sam could stop him. 

Lucifer looked bewildered, and only more so when Dean concluded the line, dropping his voice to a whisper, ‘itty bitty living space.’

Sam couldn’t help it, he began laughing while Lucifer just stared at Dean, clearly unsure what to make of this statement, or whether he should take offence to it. One hand seemed to lift itself into the air a little, fingers poised to snap, before Lucifer glanced over at Sam. The human's amusement seemed to reassure the angel, and he even smiled a little, though he clearly still didn't understand the joke. 

And despite what he;d said about returning to Heaven as soon as possible, Lucifer didn't leave that day, or that night. When Sam woke up the next morning his angel was still right beside him, and there he remained.


	12. Epilogue

Far away, on another plane, another realm, a being who hadn’t seen the Earth in thousands of years opened their eyes, disconnected themself from the chorus of their siblings around them. Two others, the two closest, noticed their sibling’s distraction and joined them above the assembled Host.

 **The Cage has been destroyed. The Archdemons walk free,** the first one said. **They shall be dealt with.**

 **What about-** the youngest tried to ask. 

The third cut off their sibling harshly. **It doesn’t matter. After so long away from the host, the Morningstar is not one of us. They might as well be a demon by now. Kill them, like the rest.**

The youngest tried still, to argue. **Cut out because of us, because we never tried to help. We cannot just abandon our sibling, again. We must welcome Samael back-**

Michael snarled a warning, and Gabriel and Raphael stopped their bickering.

 **Samael is no longer one of us.** Michael decreed. **Raphael is right. We must kill our brother on sight.**

 

The proclamation boomed through the assembled host, and Michael spread their wings, summoning the full power of Heaven to their bidding.

 

It was time for the angels to set foot on Earth once again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's the end! Of this part of the story, at least. I'm sure everyone noticed I'm planning a sequel, though I haven't so much as written down a plan or decided where I want the story to go as of yet. Perhaps for next year's Samifer Big Bang I'll continue this?
> 
> Anyway, thank you all so much, everyone thought my thirty thousand words were worth the time you put in to read them. I feel honoured that you decided to stick with me all the way to the end, and I hope I met your expectations as a writer. Please, if you enjoyed my fic, even if you didn't, tell me, let me hear every thought you have, even if it's just incoherent screaming! (I love incoherent screaming, I promise)


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